A Quote by Walter Benjamin

The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
Through artists mankind becomes an individual, in that they unite the past and the future in the present. They are the higher organ of the soul, where the life spirits of entire external mankind meet and in which inner mankind first acts.
With respect to those points, on which the declaration of Scripture is positive and decisive, as, for instance, in asserting the low antiquity of the human race; the evidence of all facts that have yet been established in Geology coincides with the records of Sacred History and Profane Tradition to confirm the conclusion that the existence of mankind can on no account be supposed to have taken its beginning before that time which is assigned to it in the Mosaic writings.
I think the Messianic concept, which is the Jewish offering to mankind, is a great victory. What does it mean? It means that history has a sense, a meaning, a direction; it goes somewhere, and necessarily in a good direction--the Messiah.
Our main inspiration [with Alix MacKenzie], I think, came from the Field Museum of Natural History, because they had pieces which were selected not for art content but for their relationship to the anthropological history of mankind.
Imagine: in the medieval ages, there was no evidence of how the history of mankind has been affected by witchcraft. But there is significant factual history of how brutality and sadism of mankind have been displayed in the most obscene manner in the name of witch-hunt.
Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe. Remarking on the complexity of Ptolemaic model of the universe after it was explained to him. Footnote: Carlyle says, in his History of Frederick the Great, book ii. chap. vii. that this saying of Alphonso about Ptolemy's astronomy, 'that it seemed a crank machine; that it was pity the Creator had not taken advice,' is still remembered by mankind, - this and no other of his many sayings.
There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.
Time after time mankind is driven against the rocks of the horrid reality of a fallen creation. And time after time mankind must learn the hard lessons of history-the lessons that for some dangerous and awful reason we can't seem to keep in our collective memory.
Jesus Christ is the greatest man in the history of the world. And to me, he's the greatest person in the history of mankind and the universe. We can't prove it, I can't put it in a test tube or in an astronomical formula, but by faith I believe it because the Bible teaches it.
Worse still is that mankind - the non-Jewish world - learned nothing from the Holocaust: The event which had no precedent in history, which should be equal to the Revelation at Sinai in significance.
In the world of the present, in our time, we feel that suffering, anguish, the torments of body and soul, are greater than ever before in the history of mankind.
If you study the history of mankind, it seems to be a history of violence. Certainly the history of art, whether you look at paintings or movies or plays or whatever, is just a litany of murder and death.
There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.
For the first time in the history of mankind, one generation literally has the power to destroy the past, the present and the future, the power to bring time to an end.
What does the artist do? He draws connections. He ties the invisible threads between things. He dives into history, be it the history of mankind, the geological history of the Earth or the beginning and end of the manifest cosmos.
The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
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