Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.

The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.

Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.

Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.

Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.