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

They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg's early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.

Intelligence is a moral category.

Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge.

There is no right life in the wrong one.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

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.