He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.

To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life ... organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet.

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

The objective tendency of the Enlightenment, to wipe out the power of images over man, is not matched by any subjective progress on the part of enlightened thinking towards freedom from images.

Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.

Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.

Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.