The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit.

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.

Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure ... The whole of life must look like a job, and by this resemblance conceal what is not yet directly devoted to pecuniary gain.

Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.

Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.