The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

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 individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

People know what they want because they know what other people want.

The capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted openness to experience amounting to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers himself.