Walter Benjamin Quotes

Human language is local and changeable, and is therefore incapable of being used as the means of unchangeable and universal information.

Language was a huge expansion of that capacity to deal with information.

Language is a nice way to remember things.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

On the other hand, in a society whose communication component is becoming more prominent day by day, both as a reality and as an issue, it is clear that language assumes a new importance.

I still understand a few words in life, but I no longer think they make a sentence.

If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code.

Reading is power. Reading is life.

Writing is a communication.

Thanks for the information about what we call business.

Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing.

We will be known forever by the tracks we leave.

I was very lucky. I don't know German, or Dutch, or Chinese, or Thai. I don't know them, so I can't judge, so I have to go on the word of the publisher that it's a good translation.

Given any new technology for transmitting information, we seem bound to use it for great quantities of small talk. We are only saved by music from being overwhelmed by nonsense.

Knowledge is power, which is why people who had it in the past often tried to make a secret of it. In post-capitalism, power comes from transmitting information to make it productive, not from hiding it.

You can transmit a thousand times more information.

A dictionary is merely the universe arranged in alphabetical order.

Technology is a vocabulary and a language in which you can say many things.

The internet is an amazing medium for languages.

This is every writer's nightmare - the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us.

That which is communicated, i.e., understood, is metaphysical. The means of communication is physical.

Languages are the keys of science.

The comics medium has some unusual features that do make it very different, in that it's combining a verbal narrative with a visual one that allows for much richer possibilities of transmitting information.

A human being creates complexity by writing a novel on the surface of paper; a weather system creates complexity by writing waves on the surface of an ocean. What is the difference between the information carried in the words of a novel and the information carried on the waves of the sea? Listen, and the waves will speak, and someday, I tell you, you will write your thoughts on the surface of the sea.

The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message