The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

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

Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.

Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.

The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth. The total interconnectedness of the culture industry, omitting nothing, is one with total social delusion.

Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.