“My images were surreal simply in the sense that my vision brought out the fantastic dimension of reality.”

The wall, safe haven for what is forbidden, gives a voice to all those who would, without it, be condemned to silence

For me the criterion of a good photograph is that it is unforgettable.

You see the dilemma?” Ham asked. “I see an idiot,” Breeze mumbled.

If there is any method in the way I take pictures, I believe it lies in this: See the subject first. Do not try to force it to be a picture of this, that or the other thing. Stand apart from it. Then something will happen. The subject will reveal itself.

If you take your inspiration from nature, you don’t invent anything, because what you want to do is to interpret something.

When you’re older and wiser a lot of the ego has gone out of the window.

I’ve never known a lot of rich people. It’s not my bag.

The purpose of art is to raise people to a higher level of awareness than they would otherwise attain on their own.

I think that it is by capturing reality in the humblest, most sincere, most everyday way I can, that I can penetrate to the extraordinary.

It’s strange how time can make a place shrink, make its strangeness ordinary.

There is nothing to compare with the courage of ordinary people whose names are unknown and whose sacrifices pass unnoticed.

Spirituality doesn’t exist on another level different from ordinary life.

I have learned not to think little of any one’s belief, no matter how strange it may be. I have tried to keep an open mind, and it is not the ordinary things of life that could close it, but the strange things, the extraordinary things, the things that make one doubt if they be mad or sane.

We believe in ordinary acts of bravery, in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

I think a repressive regime always fears people who are awakened – particularly ordinary people. If they are awakened, I think governments all over the world feel uncomfortable about that; they want to be in control.

On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.