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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
Moral
Never
Legitimation
Criminal
Criminals
Killing
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
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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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Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
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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 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.
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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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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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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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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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The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
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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 every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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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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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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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
Walter Benjamin
