Scholarship, far from leading inexorably to a profession, may in fact preclude it. For it does not permit you to abandon it.
― Walter Benjamin
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Scholarship, far from leading inexorably to a profession, may in fact preclude it. For it does not permit you to abandon it.
― Walter Benjamin
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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
― Walter Benjamin
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There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.
― Walter Benjamin
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Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
― Walter Benjamin
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Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past — which is to say, only a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments.
― Walter Benjamin
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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
― Walter Benjamin
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In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.
― Walter Benjamin
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The true sign of decadence is not the collusion of the university and the state, but the theory and guarantee of academic freedom, when in reality people assume with brutal simplicity that the aim of study is to steer its disciples to a socially conceived individuality.
― Walter Benjamin
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