The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.

When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.

Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light.

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.