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 almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.

The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.

What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness.