The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.

In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

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

Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.

There is no right life in the wrong one.

People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress.