An intellectual who accommodates the ruling caste betrays the spirit. For the spirit is not conservative and grants no privileges. It dissolves; it equalizes; and it pushes through the ruins of hundreds of castles toward the final fulfillment of truth and justice, and their completion, even if it is the completion of death.

Geist und Tat, Essays (1960), p. 14, as cited in Russell Berman, Modern Culture and Critical Theory (1989), p. 45