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.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

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

Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.