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.

A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life ... organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet.

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

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.