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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

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
Barbarism
Document
Documents
Civilization
Time

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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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Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.
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The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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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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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.
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We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
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We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
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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 adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
Walter Benjamin