Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.

Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.

It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.

The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.

Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.

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.