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Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
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
May
Train
Locomotives
Human
Revolution
Brake
Humans
Perhaps
Grabbing
Different
Says
Marx
World
Quite
Emergency
Situation
Revolutions
Race
Emergencies
History
Ride
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
Walter Benjamin
The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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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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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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It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
Walter Benjamin
By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
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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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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
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It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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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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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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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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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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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
Walter Benjamin
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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