Famous Quotes by Roland Barthes

  • The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man. More
  • New York ... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno... More
  • To hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not... More
  • Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what... More
  • What the Journal posits is not the tragic question, the Madman’s question: “Who am I?”, but... More
  • To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language... More
  • Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century.... The bourgeois and... More
  • There are two kinds of liberalism. A liberalism which is always, subterraneously authoritative... More
  • Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because... More
  • There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it. More
  • The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition ... always new books, new programs, new... More
  • The New is not a fashion, it is a value. More
  • All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising,... More
  • What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. More
  • I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean... More
  • What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the... More
  • The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he... More
  • Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion. More
  • Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth,... More
  • I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient. More
  • The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to... More
  • To eat steak rare ... represents both a nature and a morality. More
  • Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of... More
  • Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced... More
  • The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event. More
  • The photographic image ... is a message without a code. More
  • Ensnared in his starvation, Chaplin-man is always just below political awareness. A strike is a... More
  • There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a... More
  • To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and... More
  • A language is therefore a horizon, and style a vertical dimension, which together map out for the... More
  • Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone; in France, drunkenness is a... More
  • Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an... More

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