He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest. – Walter Benjamin
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. – Walter Benjamin
Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance. – Walter Benjamin
Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know. – Walter Benjamin
The functions of these elders, therefore, determine the power of the people for a representative is one chosen by others to do in their name what they are entitled to do in their own persons or rather to exercise the powers which radically inhere in those for whom they act. – Charles Hodge