375 Quotes by Walter Benjamin

It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.

How lovely it is to live with a sense of community. To live where you can drop in the street and a million people will come and help you.

In other words, the unique value of the "authentic" work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.

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

Press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the...

I was sentenced to life plus 30 years by an all-White jury. What I saw in prison was wall-to-wall Black flesh in chains. Women caged in cells. But we're the terrorists. It just doesn't make sense.

Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 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.

In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.

What most impressed me about Cuba was the optimism.