Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.

Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

... [L]ess than at any time does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or GEC yields almost nothing about those institutions. Reality proper has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relationships, the factory, let's say, no longer reveals these relationships. Therefore something has to be constructed, something artificial, something set up.

In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.