The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light.

That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.

The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject

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

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

When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.

There are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but commands silence.