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A curious paradox: people have only the narrowest private interest in mind when they act, yet they are at the same time more than ever determined in their behavior by the instincts of the mass. ... The diversity of individual goals is immaterial in face of the identity of the determining forces.

— Walter Benjamin One Way Street (1928)

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More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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

Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

Scholarship, far from leading inexorably to a profession, may in fact preclude it. For it does not permit you to abandon it.

The Life of Students (1915)

Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.

I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.

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

Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Walter Benjamin (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.