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

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.

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

Thought as such… is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it; this is what thought has inherited from its archetype, the relation between labor and material. Today, when ideologues tend more than ever to encourage thought to be positive, they cleverly note that positivity runs precisely counter to thought, and that it takes friendly persuasion by social authority to accustom thought to positivity.

Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

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.