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The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation.

— Walter Benjamin

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Film

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)

All Walter Benjamin quotes →

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A motion picture must be true to life. If a picture portrays a false emotion it train people seeing it to react abnormally.

William Moulton Marston

Not even the church is so powerfully equipped to serve the public psychologically as is the motion picture company.

William Moulton Marston

It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery.

George Orwell

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

Jean Cocteau

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.