375 Quotes by Walter Benjamin

"I had grown up at a time when people were being lynched, being attacked with water hoses. Becoming active and learning a different way of viewing my life was a healthy reaction to what I was seeing every day."

"Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday."

"I think that the greatest betrayal that a revolutionary can participate in is to become like the people you are struggling against. To become like your persecutors. I think that is a betrayal and a sin."

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

"True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original."

"The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing."

"We’re taught at such an early age to be against the communists, yet most of us don’t have the faintest idea what communism is. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is."

"We have to have a vision of the world we want to make in 100 years. And maybe when we have that vision, when we convince enough people that that is a realistic vision, and that the opposite vision is basically that if we don't do something in this 100 years, a hundred years from now this world is gonna be so destroyed, so raped and ravished that we won't HAVE much of a world to save."

"Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written."

"I stay connected in my head. I'm spiritually and psychologically connected to African-Americans. They are my people, and that will never change."