“Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality.”

Photography was the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art.

The more you do, the more you realize there is to do, what a vast object the metropolis is, and how the work of photographing could go on forever.

I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer.

Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be 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.

To be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird’s nest or a wildflower in spring – these are some of the rewards of the simple life.

The wind can be quite extreme in England. We are not familiar with that in Germany, and you have to keep things simple.

Everybody loved ‘The A-Team’ because it was entertainment, pure and simple.

We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life, a simple life, a good life.

Conversation would be vastly improved by the constant use of four simple words: I do not know.

A simple life, a good life. And think about moving the whole human race ahead a step, or a few steps.

The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.

Men are so simple and yield so readily to the desires of the moment that he who will trick will always find another who will suffer to be tricked.