A biography for Theodor W. Adornohasn’t been written yet.
“The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.”
“No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.”
“Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.”
“Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.”
“The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.”
“Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.”
“To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.”
“Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.”
“Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.”
“True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.”
“The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.”
“In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.”
“Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.”
“The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.”
“The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.”
“Life has become the ideology of its own absence.”
“When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.”
“Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.”
“The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.”
“Intelligence is a moral category.”