“Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity.”

These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.

Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.

Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It’s the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.

Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.

By contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.

What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.

To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.

You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.

Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.

All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.

You cant draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn’t work. People obeying rules laid down my somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line.

Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects.

A photograph is a result of the photographer’s decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.

I contact Allah the Holy the Merciful on a daily basis.

Each department and institution has its own authorities and responsibilities, and they act on that basis.

It began early in the revolution. It was a process that was unfolding on a daily basis. We expected the system to be dispensing justice, but every day that passed by.

The whole basis of my singing is feeling. Unless I feel something, I can’t sing.

I refuse to be released on the basis of a ‘condition for negotiations’ and I will not accept the price for my freedom to be several meters of the land of Palestine, the land that we have fought for and been imprisoned for.

This is your court and you possess the force to celebrate the trial and convict me on the basis of your lists of accusations.

The religions of the world must be assessed, not on the basis of their convoluted theologies, but in terms of the extent to which they serve as forces of liberation and empowerment.

It is only on these principles that we will be able to establish (“pourront être édifiées”, Fr.) the real basis of morality.