What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness.

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.

Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.

No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.

Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.

When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.