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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.

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
Threatens
Disappear
Image
Present
Past
Every
Irretrievably
Recognised

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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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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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To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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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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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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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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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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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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The work of memory collapses time.
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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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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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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 experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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