“Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects.”

It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.

The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.

The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.

Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can’t do is to change its consequences.

Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.

The woman’s sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion

Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;

In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.

In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles.

Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.

It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.

Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself.

A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.