Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

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

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

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.

Love is the ability to discover similarities in the dis-similar. The audience has a right not to be fooled - even if it insists on being fooled.

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.

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.