“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.”

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.

Does not the very word ‘creative’ mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act – rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life – not death.

What to me is anathema – a corpse-like, outmoded hangover – is for photography to be a bad excuse for another medium. … Is not photography good enough in itself, that it must be made to look like something else, supposedly superior?

The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework – that to me is the art of photography.

I wanted to combine science and photography in a sensible, unemotional way. Some people’s ideas of scientific photography is just arty design, something pretty. That was not the idea.

Photography is not only drawing with light, though light is the indispensable agent of its being. It is modeling or sculpturing with light, to reproduce the plastic form of natural objects. It is painting with light.

I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.

There are many teachers who could ruin you. Before you know it you could be a pale copy of this teacher or that teacher. You have to evolve on your own.

The art is in selecting what is worthwhile to take the trouble about.

I think the important decision for a photographer is to choose a subject that intensely interests him or her.

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.

Self-conscious artiness is fatal, but it certainly would not hurt to study composition in general. Having a basic understanding of composition would help construct a better organized image.

The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.

The idea was to interpret science sensibly, with good proportion, good balance and good lighting, so we could understand it.

There is no ‘cat language.’ Painful as it is for us to admit, they don’t need one!

We still need to feed the public, both physically and intellectually.

Grilling is an easy tradition to start at any age! To get started, one only needs a modest investment in equipment and a little bit of outdoor space.

Imagination needs to be fed.

We need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

Down deep we really know our worth, but we don’t have easy access to that knowledge. We need to hear praise coming from outside ourselves or we won’t remember that we deserve it.

We need to encourage members of this next generation to become all that they can become, not try to force them to become what we want them to become. . . . You and I can’t even begin to dream the dreams this next generation is going to dream, or answer the questions that will be put to them.