Quote

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

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
Critic
Betray
Peddle
Critics
Nutshell
Criticism
Betraying
Fashion
Coin
Art
Slogans
Ideas
Coins
Without
Inadequate

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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
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The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
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In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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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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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well
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To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
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