They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg's early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.

Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.

Kitsch parodies catharsis...It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despairing efforts.

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

To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.

Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.