All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils.
The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply.
Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.
The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.
What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.
In myths the warrant of grace was the acceptance of sacrifice; it is this acceptance that love, the re-enactment of sacrifice, beseeches if it is not to feel under a curse.
What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts.
In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.
Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum.
The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.
The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
By abstaining from all definite content, whether as formal logic and theory of science or as the legend of Being beyond all beings, philosophy declared its bankruptcy regarding concrete social goals.
Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.
The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market.
Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.
The straight line is regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points.
In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.
In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.
Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.