Quotes from benjamin walter ii

To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past -- which is to say, only a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l'ordre du jour -- and that day is Judgement Day.

We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.

A religion may be discerned in capitalism--that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.

Of all beings man is the only one who himself names his own kind, as he is the only one whom God did not name.

Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.

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.

Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.

The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.

Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.

He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say. He is impelled by inertia, rather than curiosity, and nothing is more unlike the submissive apathy with which he hears his fate revealed than the alert dexterity with which the man of courage lays hands on the future.

And we speak of the sexualization of the spirit: this is the morality of the prostitute. She represents culture in Eros; Eros, who is the most powerful individualist, the most hostile to culture--even he can be perverted; even he can serve culture.

The work is the death mask of its conception.