As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.

The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.

When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones?

The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.

Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.

Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.