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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.

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
Efforts
Effort
Politics
War
Thing
Culminate
Render
Aesthetic

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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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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.
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If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates if the former threatens, the latter strikes if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
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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.
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If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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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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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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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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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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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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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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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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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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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.
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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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