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It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.

Walter Benjamin

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Walter Benjamin
Age: 48 †
Born: 1892
Born: July 15
Died: 1940
Died: September 26
Art Critic
Essayist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Philosopher
Sociologist
Translator
Writer
Berlin
Germany
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin
Judging
Insinuate
Attitude
Uninformed
Media
Generated
Opinion
Irresponsible
Public
Incapable
Purpose
Precisely
Someone
Presses
Make
Press

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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
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In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
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We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.
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[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!
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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.
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It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
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