The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe

For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.

The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.

Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.

Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.