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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.

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
Illiterate
Alphabet
Photograph
Future
Read
Cannot
Take
Men

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Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.
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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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To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
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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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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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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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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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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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All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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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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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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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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We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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