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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
World
Quite
Emergency
Situation
Revolutions
Race
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History
Ride
May
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Locomotives
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Revolution
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Humans
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Different
Says
Marx
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
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In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.
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True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
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In other words, the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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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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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.
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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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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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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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