The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.

A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating.

The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.