... [L]ess than at any time does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or GEC yields almost nothing about those institutions. Reality proper has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relationships, the factory, let's say, no longer reveals these relationships. Therefore something has to be constructed, something artificial, something set up.

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.

Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.

A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.

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

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