Walter Benjamin - Historical Quotes

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The nature of this melancholy becomes clearer, once one asks the question, with whom does the historical writer of historicism actually empathize. The answer is irrefutably with the victor. Those who currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time.

Walter Benjamin

During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well

Walter Benjamin

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

Walter Benjamin

The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called "Once upon a time" in historicism's bordello.

Walter Benjamin