Barbara Kruger Quotes

The nature of man is intricate. The objects of society are of the greatest complexity and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs.

Power doesn't just exist. It is threaded through different mechanisms of control. I'm interested in those complexities. But I want to address that in very forthright language and sometimes with images.

There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.

I've always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you're doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy.

The beautiful wooden board on a stand in my father's study. The gleaming ivory pieces. The stern king. The haughty queen. The noble knight. The pious bishop. And the game itself, the way each piece contributed its individual power to the whole. It was simple. It was complex. It was savage; it was elegant. It was a dance; it was a war. It was finite and eternal. It was life.

I don't see why human people make such a heavy trip out of sex. It isn't anything complex, it is simply the best thing in life, even better than food.

Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.

Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.

Death is simple. Life is messy. Give me life, the more complicated the better.

The most difficult in the world must be easy in its beginning.

Life is not that complicated.

Life is so messy that the temptation to straighten it up is very strong. And the results always illusory.

The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.

To understand the stars would spoil their appearance.

because it seemed too simple to accept that life was an act of faith.

Economics and politics are the governing powers of life today, and that's why everything is so screwy.

Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine

It's really about putting that sort of quality and beauty back into our life.

To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.

The world is a chessboard, Madam, on which we play out our ploys and follies. You are the Queen, of course. Your moves are the strongest. For myself, I claim only to be a knight, advancing in a crooked progress. Do we move ourselves, do you think, or does a great gloved hand place on our squares

Life is multi-layered and there's no way I could do my life justice in one pat answer.

Books do not make life easier or more simple, but harder and more interesting.

Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.

At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough.

We should not lose ourselves in vainglorious sohemes for changing human nature all over the planet. Rather, we should learn to view ourselves with a sense of proportion and Christian humility before the enormous complexity of the world in which it has been given us to live.