Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge.

Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.

An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.

There is something embarrassing in... the way in which, ... turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, ... wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them.

The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.

Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.