"His face is turned toward the past, and where we see a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls them at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and reconstruct what has been smashed apart, but a storm is blowing from Paradise and it catches the angel's wings with such violence that he can never close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the wreckage in front of him piles up to the sky. This storm is what we call progress."
Walter Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte
