The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

The lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.

The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.

He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.

The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.

And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.

Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.