Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.

The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.

Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.

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

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.