375 Quotes by Walter Benjamin

If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.

He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.

To become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.

I believe in self-defense and self-determination for Africans and other oppressed people in America.

Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness

In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.

The death penalty is used in such a blatantly racist way in the United States. There is no way that can be defended under any kind of definition of justice by anybody.

My experience in the United States was living in a society that was very much at war with itself, that was very alienated. People felt not part of a community, but like isolated units that were afraid of interaction, of contact, that were lonely.

You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.