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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.

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
Form
Firsts
Matter
Demonstrating
Play
Tricks
First
Plays
Men
Capable
Art
Film

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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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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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We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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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.
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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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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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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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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
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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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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates if the former threatens, the latter strikes if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
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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 only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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