Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940)
German Jewish literary critic and philosopher.
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. [...] Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
...our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. [...] For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form—it may be called fleeting or eternal—is in neither case the stuff that life is made of.
In the fields with which we are concerned knowledge exists only in lightning flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterwards.
For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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 Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
...nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. 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 ? l'ordre du jour -- and that day is Judgement Day.
Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology.
The nature of this melancholy becomes clearer, once one asks the question, with whom does the historical writer of historicism actually empathize. The answer is irrefutably with the victor. Those who currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time.
The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can recognized and is never seen again.
The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was"...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.