• The paralysis of criticism creates a society without opposition.
  • Our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as if they were those of all sensible men. Satisfaction of these interests promotes business and the commonweal, as the whole appears to be the very embodiment of Reason. Yet, it is ethically irrational. The aggressive productivity dismisses the free development of human needs and faculties; its growth is dependent on repression of the real possibilities of pacifying the struggle for existence. Our society thrives by conquering the centrifugal social forces with technology rather than terror on a specious basis of commercial efficiency and an ever-improving standard of living.
  • Technology cannot be isolated from the use to which it is put; the technological society is a system of domination which succeeds by exploiting the concept and construction of progressive techniques. Advancing technology merges with culture, politics and the economy to become an omnipresent system which swallows up or repulses all alternatives.
  • Freedom of enterprise, as the liberty to work or starve, spelt toil, insecurity and fear for the vast majority.
  • Totalitarianism is not only a terroristic coordination of society, but an economic-technical operation using the manipulation of needs by vested interests.
  • Our social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work which is not necessary; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefication; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which barely censors itself, free consumer choice between brands and gadgets.
  • Liberty has become an instrument of domination. The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs does not establish autonomy, it only testifies to the efficiency of the controls and the controllers.
  • In a specific sense modern industrial culture is more ideological than its theory-driven predecessors, as today the ideology exists in the process of production itself.
  • The means of mass transportation and communication, the commodities of lodging, food and  clothing, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them the prescribed attitudes and habits, the intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the producers, and to the whole which indoctrinates and manipulates while promoting a false consciousness immune to criticism.
  • The purveyors of mass information occupy a universe of discourse populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hypnotic definitions or dictations.
  • Domination, as affluence and liberty, extends to all spheres of private and public existence, integrates all authentic opposition, absorbs all alternatives. Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination creating a truly totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilisation in readiness for the defence of that universe.
  • The unification of opposites which characterises the current commercial and political style is one of many ways that discourse and communication immunise themselves against expressions of protest and refusal.
  • The scientific method which led to the more effective domination of nature by man came to provide the pure concepts as well as the instruments for the more effective domination of man by man.
  • The incessant dynamic of technical progress has become permeated with political content and the Logos of technics has been converted into the Logos of continued servitude. The supposedly liberating force of technology, as the instumentalisation of things, has turned into a fetter of liberation, as the instrumentalisation of MAN. Technology has become a great vehicle of reification in its most mature and effective form.
  • The ideas of justice, freedom and humanity obtain their truth and good conscience in the satisfaction of man’s material needs via the rational organisation of the realm of necessity.
  • At its most advanced stage domination functions as administration and in the overdeveloped areas of mass consumption the administered life becomes good for the whole in the defence of which opposites are united.