Giorgio Agamben is possibly the most delicate and probing…

Bertrand Russell said, 'Electricity is not a thing like St. Paul's Cathedral; it is a way in which things behave.' And it's not 'they'…

— Mary Jo Bang

Walter Benjamin has this notion of the angel of history and in a way that's paradoxical itself. We don't have angels in history anymore.…

— Steve Stern

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while…

— Terry Eagleton

I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as…

— Susan Sontag

Walter Benjamin talks about art losing its original "aura" in an age of mechanical reproduction. In writing memoir, we're taking something that happened in…

— Lucas Mann

“Reading Proust nearly silenced Virginia Woolf. She loved his novel, but loved it rather too much. There wasn’t enough wrong with it—a crushing recognition…

— Alain de Botton

“Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance—nothing more," says the twentieth-century philosopher-essayist Walter Benjamin.…

— Rebecca Solnit

An exciting and yet highly lucid account of the formation and significance of Karl Kraus's modernist journalism, an activity that Walter Benjamin and Gershom…

— Istvan Deak

At any rate, nothing was more characteristic of him [Walter Benjamin] in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always…

— Hannah Arendt

“(Mind you, according to Walter Benjamin, the twentieth century’s great philosopher of collecting, browsing and what we’d now call vintage shopping, ‘the non-reading of…

— Simon Reynolds

“The research projects that I have recently undertaken have shown me that our modern societies, which claim to be secular, are, on the contrary,…

— Anonymous

“It" is the idea of him or her that resides in us--inspired by the "Something" in them, as Pope has it, "That gives us…

— Joseph Roach

“Briskly aestheticizing politics, this predecessor of today’s live-streaming militants outlined a likely endgame for a world in which, as Walter Benjamin wrote, the self-alienation…

— Pankaj Mishra

“The difference between a person who appreciates books, even loves them, and a collector is not only degrees of affection, I realized. For the…

— Allison Hoover Bartlett

“Cities have often been compared to language: you can read a city, it’s said, as you read a book. But the metaphor can be…

— Valeria Luiselli