“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”
Source: (1940), VIII
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Walter Benjamin 70
German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892… 1892–1940Related quotes

The End of State http://www.gov.am/files/docs/217.pdf
2008

“Our lives teach us who we are.”
I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own — and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs — then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.
"Free speech is a non-starter," says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir, it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
Address at Columbia University (1991)

“When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.”
Source: Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America

Nobel lecture (1981)
Context: The former scope of science, its limitations, world perspectives, views of human nature, and its societal role as an intellectual, cultural and moral force all undergo profound change. Where there used to be a chasm and irreconcilable conflict between the scientific and the traditional humanistic views of man and the world, we now perceive a continuum. A unifying new interpretative framework emerges with far reaching impact not only for science but for those ultimate value-belief guidelines by which mankind has tried to live and find meaning.

Le Vicomte de Bragelonne ou Dix ans plus (The Vicomte de Bragelonne) (1847)

“No rule is so general, which admits not some exception.”
Section 2, member 2, subsection 3, Custom of Diet, Delight, Appetite, Necessity, how they cause or hinder.
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part I