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

What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness.

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.

Intelligence is a moral category.

If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.