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.

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

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

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.

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