“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.”

The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together

If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

The zoo cannot but disappoint.

It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

To be naked is to be oneself.

Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.

The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

[O]ften art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.

This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.

As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances.

What any true painting touches is an absence – an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.

Publicity is the life of this culture – in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive – and at the same time publicity is its dream.

Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.

Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.

Genius can write on the back of old envelopes but mere talent requires the finest stationery available.

A knife of the keenest steel requires the whetstone, and the wisest man needs advice.

Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems .

From abundance springs safety.

The completely simultaneous and perfect possession of unlimited life at a single moment.

The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials.

I went on the courts with just a ball and a racket and a hope and that’s all I had.

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.