The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit.

The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity

The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating.

People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress.

Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness.

Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.

Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.