Quote by Franz Kafka: “There is infinite hope, but not for us.”

Hope exists as a concept — there is always the possibility of something better. But that hope is not available to everyone equally. This captures how systems of power can sustain the idea of salvation while keeping it permanently out of reach for those who need it most.

This remark was recorded by Max Brod, who attributed it to Kafka during their conversations in 1917. Europe was in the middle of the First World War, and the old empires — including the Austro-Hungarian Empire that shaped Kafka's world — were visibly crumbling. Kafka's own health was deteriorating, and the mood of collapse pervades his writing of this period.

Czech-German writer whose novels and stories, including The Trial and The Metamorphosis, created a body of work so distinctive that 'Kafkaesque' entered everyday language as a description of nightmarish bureaucracy. Writing mostly in German, he published little in his lifetime and asked his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts after his death.