"I remember well a junior seminar I gave with Paul Tillich shortly before the outbreak of the Third Reich. A participant spoke out against the idea of the meaning of existence. She said life did not seem very meaningful to her and she didn’t know whether it had a meaning. The very voluble Nazi contingent became very excited by this and scraped the floor noisily with their feet. Now, I do not wish to maintain that this Nazi foot-shuffling proves or refutes anything in particular, but I do find it highly significant. I would say it is a touchstone for the relation of thinking to freedom. It raises the question whether thought can bear the idea that a given reality is meaningless and that mind is unable to orientate itself; or whether the intellect has become so enfeebled that it finds itself paralysed by the idea that all is not well with the world."

“We are really no longer ourselves a part of nature at the moment when we notice, when we recognize, that we are a part of nature.”

“In America I was liberated from a certain naïve belief in culture and attained the capacity to see culture from the outside. To clarify the point: in spite of all social criticism and all consciousness of the primacy of economic factors, the fundamental importance of the mind—“Geist”—was quasi a dogma self-evident to me from the very beginning. The fact that this was not a foregone conclusion, I learned in America, where no reverential silence in the presence of everything intellectual prevailed.”

“In organized groups such as the army or the Church there is either no mention of love whatsoever between the members, or it is expressed only in a sublimated and indirect way, through the mediation of some religious imagine in the love of whom the members unite and whose all-embracing love they are supposed to imitate in their attitude towards each other. ... It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends.”

“Immer von Beckett ist eine technische Reduktion bis zum äußersten. ... Aber diese Reduktion ist ja wirklich das was die Welt aus uns macht ... das heißt die Welt aus uns gemacht diese Stümpfe von Menschen also diese Menschen die eigentlich ihr ich ihr verloren haben die sind wirklich die Produkte der Welt in der wir leben.”

“Jazz is the false liquidation of art — instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.”

“Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch”