This line from Walter Benjamin made me wince and chuckle at the same time:
"The intellectuals, as always, were the first to acclaim the builder of their own scaffold."
Context, if you're interested, here. It's the context that really gives the line its weight, but something Benjamin says of another writer certainly applies here as well: "This makes his work full of passages that, like double exposures, project information of immediate interest onto a background of the recent past." Recent being a relative term of course.
