When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.

The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.

The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic.

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

Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.

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.