The lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.

Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

People know what they want because they know what other people want.

The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.