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.

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.

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.

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

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

In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.

Intelligence is a moral category.