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

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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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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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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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Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him it is he who lives 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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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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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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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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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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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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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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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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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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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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The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
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In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.
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