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

Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.

Thought as such… is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it; this is what thought has inherited from its archetype, the relation between labor and material. Today, when ideologues tend more than ever to encourage thought to be positive, they cleverly note that positivity runs precisely counter to thought, and that it takes friendly persuasion by social authority to accustom thought to positivity.

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.

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 most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit.

Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.