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.

Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.

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.

Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.

Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.