The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.

The photographic image... is a message without a code.

What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.

Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it's been pretty fun.

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.

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.

Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.

The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

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!

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.

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.

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

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.

The New is not a fashion, it is a value.

What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.

There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.

To eat steak rare... represents both a nature and a morality.

That ambiguous area of culture where something unfailingly political, though separate from the political choices of the day, infiltrates judgment and language.

There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society to retreat ahead of it.

The photographic image is a message without a code.

New York is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.

In the hierarchy of the major poetic substances, it [plastic] figures as a disgraced material, lost between the effusiveness of rubber and the flat hardness of metal.

Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.

The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.

One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.

Where you are tender, you speak your plural.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

I am neither a child, a young man, nor an ancient; nor am I of any caste.

I want the municipality to be a helping hand to the man with a desire of sympathy, to help the fallen when it is not in their power to help themselves.

I always looked for a man to rescue me and bring me happiness. I bought into that myth, of course, and looked for my own Prince Charming.

A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows is one of the earliest as well as the keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man.

Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.

Let me first state that I believe that marriage is a sacred union between one man and one woman.

A man must be strong in that profession, he must have vigor of body and mind, yet I am all out of breath if I walk up a hill; I have not the heart to crush even a fly.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

I believe that if a man does a job as well as a woman, he should be paid as much.

For a man to strike any women is most brutal, and I, as well as everyone else, think this far worse than any attempt to shoot, which, wicked as it is, is at least more comprehensible and more courageous.

There is always a type of man who says he loves his fellow men, and expects to make a living at it.

A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.

The bravest sight in the world is to see a great man struggling against adversity.

If a man is dumb, someone is going to get the best of him, so why not you? If you don't, you're as dumb as he is.

Happy the man who has been able to learn the causes of things.