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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
History
Ride
May
Train
Locomotives
Human
Revolution
Brake
Humans
Perhaps
Grabbing
Different
Says
Marx
World
Quite
Emergency
Situation
Revolutions
Race
Emergencies
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
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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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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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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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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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
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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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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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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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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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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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