In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.

In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison.

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.

Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.

The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good olddays. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physicaldemythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, rooflesswandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right towalk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror. Thewalk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage ofthe feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.

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