There's not much need for prophets who are in synch with their society.

So the experience of death is turned into that of the exchange of functionaries, and anything in the natural relationship to death that is not wholly absorbed into the social one is turned over to hygiene. In being seen as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social combine, death has been domesticated: dying merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of the natural organism in face of the social absolute.

Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.

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

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

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.

An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.