Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.

People have so manipulated the concept of freedom that it finally boils down to the right of the stronger and richer to take from the weaker and poorer whatever they still have.

A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.

He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.

The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.

There are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but commands silence.