Quote

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

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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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By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
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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 only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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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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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him it is he who lives in them.
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I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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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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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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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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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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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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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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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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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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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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