The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

Intelligence is a moral category.

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

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

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

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.

The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good olddays. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physicaldemythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, rooflesswandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right towalk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror. Thewalk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage ofthe feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.