There is no love that is not an echo.

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects.

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.

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 objective tendency of the Enlightenment, to wipe out the power of images over man, is not matched by any subjective progress on the part of enlightened thinking towards freedom from images.