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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

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
Cannibal
Lovingly
Spices
Genuine
Approach
Baby
Girl
Book
Polemics

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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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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
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A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
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Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
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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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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
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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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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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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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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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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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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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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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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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