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[...] The bourgeois have made of satiety, which might be akin to bliss, a term of abuse. Because others go hungry, ideology requires that the absence of hunger be thought vulgar. So the bourgeois indict the bourgeois. Their own exemption from work proscribes the praise of idleness: the latter is ca…

Sleepless night: so there is a formula for those tormented hours, drawn out without prospect of end or dawn, in the vain effort to forget time's empty passing. But truly terrifying are the sleepless nights when time seems to contract and run fruitlessly through our hands. We put out the light in th…

[...] Genuine things are those to which commodities and other means of exchange can be reduced, particularly gold. But like gold, genuineness, abstracted as the proportion of fine metal, becomes a fetish. Both are treated as if they were the foundation, which in reality is a social relation, while …

If one gave way to a need to place the system of the culture industry in a wide, world-historical perspective, it would have to be defined as the systematic exploitation of the ancient fissure between men and their culture. The dual nature of progress, which always developed the potential of freedo…

The injunction to practise intellectual honesty usually amounts to sabotage of thought. The writer is urged to show explicitly all the steps that have led him to his conclusion, so enabling every reader to follow the process through and, where possible — in the academic industry — to duplicate it. …