Roland Barthes Quotes

language is never neutral

Every body and thing has politics involved. Every. Single. Thing.

A word after a word after a word is power.

All literature is political.

Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.

Language usage always has a political context.

Our world isn't made of earth, air and water or even molecules and atoms; our world is made of language.

We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.

Technology is not neutral.

Society is made of words, whose meanings the powerful control, or try to.

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

The meanings of words and the uses of words come from practice from the way people in a given culture use those words.

If you or I had lived 500 years ago, our worldview, and the decisions we made as a result, would have been utterly different. Our minds are shaped by our social environment, in particular the belief systems projected by those in power: monarchs, aristocrats and theologians then; corporations, billionaires and the media today.

In Mexico, the perception of power is power.

I have this theory about words. There's a thousand ways to say "Pass the salt". It could mean, you know, "Can I have some salt?" or it could mean, "I love you.". It could mean, "I'm very annoyed with you". Really, the list could go on and on. Words are little bombs, and they have a lot of energy inside them.

Poststructuralism. . . . is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning.

A language is the appearances of connections therefore language as in writing doesn't express anything: it creates.

Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.

Often I am struck in amazement about a word: I suddenly realize that the complete arbitrariness of our language is but a part of the arbitrariness of our own world in general.

The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once.

And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.

The Eskimos live among ice all their lives but have no single word for ice.

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.

Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.