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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.

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
Criminal
Criminals
Killing
Moral
Never
Legitimation

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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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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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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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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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For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
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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.
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The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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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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The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
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We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
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The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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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.
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