Quote

Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism

Walter Benjamin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Inspirational
Every
Barbarism
Monument
Civilization

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

Image
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.
Walter Benjamin
Image
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.
Walter Benjamin
Image
In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.
Walter Benjamin
Image
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
Walter Benjamin
Image
You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
Walter Benjamin
Image
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.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
Walter Benjamin
Image
The work of memory collapses time.
Walter Benjamin
Image
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.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
Walter Benjamin
Image
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.
Walter Benjamin
Image
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
Walter Benjamin
Image
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.
Walter Benjamin