Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
ROLAND BARTHESIf I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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The new is not a fashion, it is a value.
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Thus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
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A picture is never anything but its own plural description.
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Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.
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Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
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Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
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The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
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Language is never innocent.
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The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!
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A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony.
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Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack to the feast, from the conversation at the local cafT to the speech at a formal dinner.
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Literature is the question minus the answer.
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Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
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I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).
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I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it’s been pretty fun.
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Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
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The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.
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I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.
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To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.
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Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
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All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.
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There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.
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Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
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As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
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Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
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Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things
ROLAND BARTHES