Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.

Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.

In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects.

In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison.

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

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

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.