Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.

It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.

People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress.

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.

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