Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress.

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 capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted openness to experience amounting to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers himself.

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. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.