Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.

Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.

Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.

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.

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 splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.

The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.