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

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.

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.

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.