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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.

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
Little
Vast
Turbines
Machine
Apparatus
Machines
Applies
Opinion
Pour
Existence
Joints
Social
Oil
Doe
Hidden
Littles
Opinions

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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
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The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
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Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
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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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To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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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 end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
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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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The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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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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