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.

The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.

Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.

The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.

As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.