“Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.”

“Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.”

“The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.”

“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.”

“Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.”

“He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty,nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against suchawareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.”

“In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects.”