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.
The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.
Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness.
In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation.
The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning
Triviality is evil – triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.
On the way from mythology to logistics thought has lost the element of self-reflection and today machinery disables men even as it nurtures them.
Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.
It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.
Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
A film which followed the code of the Hays Office to the strictest letter might succeed in being a great work of art, but not in a world in which a Hays Office exists.