“Some people are still unaware that reality contains unparalleled beauties. The fantastic and unexpected, the ever-changing and renewing is nowhere so exemplified as in real life itself.”

I agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs.

Photography doesn’t teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.

I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism – real life – the now.

You scientists are the worst photographers in the world and you need the best photographers in the world and I’m the one to do it.

To chart a course, one must have a direction. In reality, the eye is no better than the philosophy behind it.

I am so fascinated with this century it will help keep me alive. I’ll be there until the last minute, fighting.

Abstraction in photography is ridiculous, and is only an imitation of painting. We stopped imitating painters a hundred years ago, so to imitate them in this day and age is laughable.

It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.

I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph.

I didn’t decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.

I’m not a nice girl; I’m a photographer. (On being told by a Federal Art Project official, after she photographed the Bowery, that a nice girl should not go into such neighborhoods )

Actually, documentary pictures include every subject in the world – good, bad, indifferent. I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.

What we need of equipment is this: let it possess as good a structure as the real-life content that surrounds us. We need more simplifications to free us for seeing.

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

None. They should just go out and photograph and stop talking about it. That’s the only way they are going to find themselves. They can’t do it in their heads – they have to go out and do it in the camera and get it on film.

Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times – the pulse of today.

It’s a glorious universe the positive thinkers have come up with, a vast, shimmering aurora borealis in which desires mingle freely with their realizations. … Dreams go out and fulfill themselves; wishes need only to be articulated.

I don’t know how you bridge that contradiction, but I felt that Barack Obama was sincere. It didn’t feel like a line to me.

If I advocate cautious optimism it is not because I do not have faith in the future but because I do not want to encourage blind faith.

If we consistently act on the optimistic hypothesis, this hypothesis will tend to be realised; whilst by acting on the pessimistic hypothesis we can keep ourselves for ever in the pit of want.

I’m always an optimist!

I always have an optimistic view, no matter what it is.

History demonstrates that participants in financial markets are susceptible to waves of optimism.

I think we all like to see ourselves as good dads, but there’s also that fear, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be like my father,’ or, ‘I hope my kid doesn’t turn out like me.’ You know, I have those feelings too. So the key is optimism.