375 Quotes by Walter Benjamin

I had to adjust to living in a Third World country, which means that things people in the U.S. take for granted-like hot running water whenever you turn on the tap-are not always available.

There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the flneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forego the life of the gentleman of leisure. His leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of labour which makes people into specialists. it was also his protest against their industriousness. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. the flneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them.

I've always been a student of different ways of looking at the world, different religions. That's been part of my survival mechanism, and also part of my curiosity as a person.

In the long run, the people are our only appeal. The only ones who can free us are ourselves.

If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-​destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood

I'm crafting a vision of my life that involves creativity. And Cuban society allows me to do this. I know it's harder in the U.S. where so many people are just grateful to have a job.

I am a Black revolutionary woman, and because of this i have been charged with and accused of every alleged crime in which a woman was believed to have participated. The alleged crimes in which only men were supposedly involved, i have been accused of planning. They have plastered pictures alleged to be me in post offices, airports, hotels, police cars, subways, banks, television, and newspapers. They have offered . rewards for my capture and they have issued orders to shoot on sight and shoot to kill.

Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.

There's something about approaching 50 that's very liberating. Political struggle has always been a 24-hour-a-day job for me. I felt I could never take time out for myself. Now I feel I owe it to myself to develop in ways I've been putting off all my life.