Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.