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

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
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Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.
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Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
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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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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
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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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Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.
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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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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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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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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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