Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge.

Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.

Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.