Rampant technolgy eliminates luxury, but not by declaring privilege a human right; rather, it does so by both raising the general standard of living and cutting off the possibility of fulfilment.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

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.

It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.

Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.

As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers