375 Quotes by Walter Benjamin

The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.

How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!

In times of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everyone will be in a situation where he has to play detective.

The work of memory collapses time.

Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.

History is written by the victors.

Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.