The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

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

Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

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

The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.