ROLAND BARTHES

To eat steak rare... represents both a nature and a morality.

Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

The photographic image... is a message without a code.

The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.

What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.

To 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.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.

What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.

Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.

Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.

I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it's been pretty fun.

For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.

Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.

The New is not a fashion, it is a value.

The processes of history in themselves … pose an interesting question- among so many others, that of their status. The status of a process may be affirmative, negative or interrogative. But the status of historical discourse is uniformly assertive, affirmative. The historical fact is linguistically associated with a privileged ontological status: we recount what has been, not what has not been, or what has been uncertain … historical discourse is not acquainted with negation.

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.

Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.

The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself.

For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.