Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.

Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.

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

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.

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.