Roland Barthes Quotes

I think with all my books, language has been their subject as much as anything else. Language can elide or displace or sideline whole groups of people. You can't necessarily change the way language is used, but if it becomes something you're conscious of... that gives you a certain power over it.

We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has.

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Words have power. Words created this universe... Everything started with the Word. The Bible says, 'In the beginning was the word.' In the same way, your words have creative power.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Women have had the power of naming stolen from us.

If French is no longer the language of a power, it can be the language of a counter power.

Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.

Mastery of language affords remarkable power.

You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse

Opinion is, as it were, the queen of the world, but force is its tyrant.

Prestige is the shadow of money and power. Where these are, there it is. Like the national market for soap or automobiles and the enlarged arena of federal power, the national cash-in area for prestige has grown, slowly being consolidated into a truly national system.

Many politicians in the West cling to the notion of a partnership with Russia. They want to include [Vladimir] Putin, make compromises and constantly negotiate new deals with him. But history has taught us that the longer we pursue appeasement and do nothing, the higher the price will be later on. Dictators don't ask "Why?" before they seize even more power. They ask: "Why not?"

He who performs his duty in a station of great power must needs incur the utter enmity of many, and the high displeasure of more.

Power is not a means; it is an end.

Grammar, which knows how to lord it over kings, and with high hands makes them obey its laws.

Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil. In an America where our reality may seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power, and to offer moral alternatives. Imagination is the instrument of ethics. There are many metaphors besides battle, many choices besides war, and most ways of doing good do not, in fact, involve killing anybody. Fanstasy is good at thinking about those other ways.

While might certainly does not make right, neither does right by itself make might.

Safer to be feared than loved.

Praise is the daughter of present power.

In this world, fear has no place. Only strength respects strength.

The will to power, as the modern age from Hobbes to Nietzsche understood it, far from being a characteristic of the strong, is, like envy and greed, among the vices of the weak, and possibly even their most dangerous one. Power corrupts indeed when the weak band together in order to ruin the strong, but not before.

The thing that gives you power also traps you.

I can't let it pass when you say: "You are the weak party." No, I am not the weak party. I am the man who is making the war. I am the man who is making the peace.