To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
ROLAND BARTHESTo try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.
ROLAND BARTHES -
He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
ROLAND BARTHES -
How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
ROLAND BARTHES -
The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!
ROLAND BARTHES -
Language is never innocent.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Why is it better to last than to burn?
ROLAND BARTHES -
Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? -This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.
ROLAND BARTHES -
All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
ROLAND BARTHES -
To eat steak rare represents both a nature and a morality.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.
ROLAND BARTHES