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.

Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.

To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life ... organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet.

Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness.