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.

Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.

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.

Kitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which kitsch is otherwise deeply anatagonistic.

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.

In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.