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

The objective tendency of the Enlightenment, to wipe out the power of images over man, is not matched by any subjective progress on the part of enlightened thinking towards freedom from images.

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.

There is something embarrassing in... the way in which, ... turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, ... wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them.

Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.

Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.

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