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

Intelligence is a moral category.

Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.

Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.