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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.

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
Quarrels
Debate
Public
Books
Book
Harlots

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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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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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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.
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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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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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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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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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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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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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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
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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.
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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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The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
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The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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