· Technology consigns the outer image of things to a long farewell, like banknotes that are bound to lose their value. (II, 3, 1925/27)

· [Kitsch] It is the last mask of the banal, the one with which we adorn ourselves, in dream and conversation, so as to take in the energies of an outlived world of things. (II, 4, 1925/27)

· There are times when things and thoughts should be weighed and not counted. But also—though this often escapes notice—there are times when things are counted and not weighed. (II, 9, /1927)

· If Russian literature is what it ought to be, its best products can only be the colored illustrations in the primer from which peasants learn to read in the shadow of Lenin. (II, 9, /1927)

· Eisenstein, the director of Potemkin, is making a film about peasant life in which he intends to dispense with actors altogether. (II, 14, /1927)

· It is a truism that political tendencies are implicit in every work of art, every artistic epoch—since, after all, they are historical configurations of consciousness… The technical revolutions are the fracture points of artistic development; it is there that the different political tendencies may be said to come to the surface…. The vital, fundamental advances in art are a matter neither of new content nor of new forms—the technological revolution takes precedence over both. (II, 16-17, /1927)

· film is the prism in which the spaces of the immediate environment… are laid open before their eyes in a comprehensible, meaningful, and passionate way. (II, 17, /1927)

· [Potemkin] This kind of film is comic, but only in the sense that the laughter it provokes hovers over an abyss of horror. The obverse of a ludicrously liberated technology is the lethal power of naval squadrons on maneuver, as we see it openly displayed in Potemkin. (II, 17, /1927)

· the intellectual… willy, nilly, consciously or unconsciously, works in the service of a class and receives his mandate from a class. (II, 20, 1927)

· [Begging] Here it is a corporation of the dying. (II, 27, /1927)

· [Begging] its strongest foundation, the bad social conscience, which opens purses so much wider than does pity. (II, 28, /1927)

· One is tempted to say that minutes are a cheap liquor of which they can never get enough, that they are tipsy with time. 9II, 31, /1927)

· Under capitalism, power and money have become commensurable qualities. (II, 34, /1927)

· It is now apparent in Russia that European values are being popularized in just the distorted, desolating form that they owe finally to imperialism. (II, 37, /1927)

· I was almost the only person who was alone. (II< 63, 1927)

 

· To represent history as a trial in which man, as an advocate of dumb nature, brings charges against all Creation, and cites the failure of the promised Messiah to appear. The court, however, decides to hear witnesses for the future. Then appear the poet, who senses the future; the artist, who sees it;, the muscian, who hears it; and the philosopher, who knows it. (II, 68, 1927)

 

· "…" or "__," the universal Morse code used in literature to represent the language of love. As is well known, this emancipation from the Morse code in the description of sexual acts is labeled "pornography."… the downward torrent of language into smut and vulgarity should be used as a mighty source of language to drive the dynamo of the creative act. (II, 72-73, /1927)

 

· the fairy tale…the disenchantment of the sinister powers embodied in the sage. (II, 78, 1928)

 

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