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

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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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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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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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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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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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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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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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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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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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I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.
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A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.
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Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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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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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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