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… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
“The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than of convictions, and of such facts as have scarcely… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
“It should be pointed out that certain correlative concepts retain their meaning, and possibly their foremost significance, if they are referred exclusively to man.… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
“to great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives.” — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the flneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
