The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.

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.

The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic.

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

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