History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

Kitsch parodies catharsis...It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despairing efforts.

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.

Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.