Walter Benjamin

"The apparatus of mass communication can, and must be turned against itself."

"What enables the new form to be perceived is precisely the fact that it is produced in the service of the old."

"The best political weapon is the weapon of time."

"Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time."

"The past is always a present past."

"To know human nature one must have lived."

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

"The true picture of the past flits by; only in a flash can it be grasped as a whole."

"Memory must be continually revisited and refreshed."

"There is a secret accord between past and the present generation."

"In the full light of nineteenth-century science and industry, the old forms of life still seemed to prevail."

"Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty."

"To be radical means to grasp the matter by the root."

"The writer's importance lies in his relation to society."

"Not to have written anything is perhaps the first condition for being a writer."

"Experience which was once communicated by elders to the young, is being replaced by the dream image."

"Whoever has emerged victorious forges the history of the vanquished."

"There is no such thing as a document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."

"Capitalism will not perish of contradictions within itself but of the fact that it has become an end in itself."

"The world is more profound and more paradoxical than it appears to be."

"Thought grinds to a halt in wonder."

"To know what is lost when a tradition dies is to understand tradition itself."

"The streets of Paris led him into the past as if it were the future."

"The only true progress is that which leads to freedom."

"Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past; it is the theatre of all such efforts."

"Objects are not equally distributed between the objective and subjective poles."

"To awaken to the world is to understand its malady."

"Capitalism has created a world in its own image."

"The origin is the goal."

"The past will become a key to the future."