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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
Present
Past
Every
Irretrievably
Recognised
Threatens
Disappear
Image

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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.
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Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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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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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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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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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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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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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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