Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

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 culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.

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.

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.

Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.