Roland Barthes Quotes
"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
(Related: Policy, Being, Ending, Trouble)
"The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Man)
"What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Passion, Public)
"Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Knowledge, Formula, Mythology, World)
"There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Alienation, Day, Present)
"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."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Love, Language)
"The New is not a fashion, it is a value."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Fashion, Value)
"What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Time, Truth, Contradiction, May, Sarcasm)
"To eat steak rare... represents both a nature and a morality."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Nature, Morality)
"The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Books, Culture, Meaning, News, Repetition)
"A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see."
- Roland Barthes
"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."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Needs, Theatre)
"I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Power, Blame, Guilt)
"I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it's been pretty fun."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Life, Fun, Pretty)
"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."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Power, Forget, Language, Legislation, Speech)
"Literature is the question minus the answer."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Literature, Question)
"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."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Literature, Saying, Trouble, Worth)
"Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Lie, Myth)
"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."
- Roland Barthes
(Related: Desire, Language, Words)