Quotes from WALTER BENJAMIN

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize "how it really was." It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

Loneliness is when those you love are happy without you.

oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.

A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history.

The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.

Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.

It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.

Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.

For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.

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

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.

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.

Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.

Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.

Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.

Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.

The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.

Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.