375 Quotes by Walter Benjamin

I must confess that waltzes do not move me, I guess I hummed the blues too early, and spent too many midnights out wailing to the rain.

The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.

Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange our experiences...Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.

We are pregnant with freedom.

To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.

Are you ready to sacrifice to end world hunger? To sacrifice to end colonialism? To end neo-colonialism? To end racism? To end sexism?

A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.

All you have to do is ask yourselves, who controls the government? And who are the victims of that control?

The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.