Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.

There's not much need for prophets who are in synch with their society.

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

No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.

What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness.

To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.