As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers

Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.

Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

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

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

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.

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