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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

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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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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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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These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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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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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.
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For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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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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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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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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