Theodor Adorno

“True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.”

“No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.”

“Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.”

“The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.”

“Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.”

“Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.”

“Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.”

“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.”

“Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.”

“Normality is death.”

“Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.”

“Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.”

“A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.”

“Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.”

“History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.”

“Intelligence is a moral category.”

“Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”

“Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.”

“Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.”

“If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.”

“None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.”

“The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.”

“The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.”

“He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.”