In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact.
People know what they want because they know what other people want.
Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.
Rampant technolgy eliminates luxury, but not by declaring privilege a human right; rather, it does so by both raising the general standard of living and cutting off the possibility of fulfilment.
There is no right life in the wrong one.
Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.
In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison.
The whole is the false.
All the world’s not a stage.
Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.
The lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
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.
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.
One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.
As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers.
Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.
The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.
The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.