Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.
What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.
Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.
Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.
Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.
The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.
The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.
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.
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.
It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends.
All the world's not a stage.
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
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.
Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.
Life has become the ideology of its own absence.
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.
Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy.
Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.
There is something embarrassing in... the way in which, ... turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, ... wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them.
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