“Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.”

A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.

(The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguises.

What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves.

Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible.

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

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.

Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.

A person is not merely a single subject distinguished from all the others. It is especially a being to which is attributed a relative autonomy in relation to the environment with which it is most immediately in contact.

The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.

I have always thought it a great privilege to have as my colleague in the Palit Chair of Chemistry such a distinguished pioneer in scientific research and education in Bengal as Sir Prafulla Ray.

When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual.

There is a kind of elevation which does not depend on fortune; it is a certain air which distinguishes us, and seems to destine us for great things; it is a price which we imperceptibly set upon ourselves.

The word liberal distinguishes whatever nourishes the mind and spirit from the training which is merely practical or professional or from the trivialities which are no training at all.

Janis Joplin has one of the most distinguished female voices of the decade. It is a voice that has been aged in Southern Comfort and cured with Kahlua and milk.