The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.

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

The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.

Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.

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.

Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.

And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.