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.

An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.

Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

Kitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which kitsch is otherwise deeply anatagonistic.

The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating.

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