The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

People have so manipulated the concept of freedom that it finally boils down to the right of the stronger and richer to take from the weaker and poorer whatever they still have.

Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.

Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.

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.

The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic.

In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.