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Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology.

— Walter Benjamin Arcades Project (1927)

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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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We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.

Buckminster Fuller

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Alfred North Whitehead An Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

John Gilmore

If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner growth, then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.

Pope Benedict XVI

Attribution

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.