Walter Benjamin

"Seek out the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange."

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

"The angel of history must have this appearance because he cannot turn, cannot pause and cannot turn back."

"All genuine literary talent must contribute to changing the world through its work."

"Messianic time is the moment of awakening from the dream of history."

"Every epoch dreams the one to follow."

"Culture is the sediment of barbarism."

"To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was.' It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger."

"The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again."

"We must awaken to this now that science cannot be the sole arbiter of truth."

"Language itself is a tool through which worlds are created and destroyed."

"The work is the death mask of conception."

"To live in the modern world, one must learn to think like a madman and speak like a sage."

"Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably."

"The materialist has to employ a different concept of time altogether from the historian's."

"Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope."

"The authentic seal of a work lies in its ability to transform even despair into an emancipatory force."

"To read what was never written is the true art of understanding."

"Luxury and wretchedness live door by door in the modern metropolis."

"The gift of genius is the ability to see what has already been thought as if it were being thought for the first time."

"Memory is not the instrument of exploration of history; history is the instrument of exploration of memory."

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of exception in which we live is the rule."

"To know oneself is to study oneself in action with people; we learn who we are by learning how we relate."

"The past carries within it a secret index that refers us to liberation."

"In the most perfect human being, there is a primitive being caged."

"The concept of progress makes sense only when we believe in an end to history."

"To write history is to give to the past something it never had while it lived: closure."

"The catastrophe of the present is that we cannot see its catastrophic character."

"Every epoch, in its dreams of the following epoch, experiences a profoundly utopian moment."

"The angel does not want to be here, but cannot leave; such is the nature of consciousness."