It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

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

Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy.

The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.

Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.

People have so manipulated the concept of freedom that it finally boils down to the right of the stronger and richer to take from the weaker and poorer whatever they still have.