Walter Benjamin

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize __ow it really was._ It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forgetting? ... And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart to Penelope's work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting.

What has been forgotten.... is never something purely individual.

Every line we succeed in publishing today - no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it - is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness.

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the __mergency situation_ in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve. Not the least reason that the latter has a chance is that its opponents, in the name of progress, greet it as a historical norm. _ The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are __till_ possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.

What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.

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.

There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.

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.

History is written by the victors.

The expressions of those moving about a picture gallery show ill-concealed disappointment that they only find pictures there.

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

That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe.

All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.