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

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

Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.

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.

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