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

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.

Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humor and passion.

If you're doing something new you've got to have a vision. You've got to have a perspective. You've got to have some north star you're aiming for, and you just believe somehow you'll get there, which kind of gets to the passion point.

But my passion is racing cars. It's what I like to do in my off time.

Strength of mind rests in sobriety; for this keeps your reason unclouded by passion.

It is, perhaps, better to be valued as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

In the earliest days, this was a project I worked on with great passion because I wanted to solve the Defense Department's problem: it did not want proprietary networking and it didn't want to be confined to a single network technology.

No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.

Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

You need the words, you need the script, you need the material, you need the commitment, you need the passion, it's like we depend on writers, we depend on producers, directors depend on us and once things are in the divine order as they happen.

Americans admire a people who can scratch a desert and produce a garden. The Israelis have shown qualities that Americans identify with: guts, patriotism, idealism, a passion for freedom. I have seen it. I know. I believe that.

Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness.

I respect people who feel things passionately. I do. But when someone is a judge, that is not what they should bring to the bench. It is not really passion, except in rare instances, that serves the bench well. It is, rather, an ability to understand the law and follow it.

I would love to do more music, definitely. That is my true passion. Dance is first and then music.

If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.

If you have a great passion it seems that the logical thing is to see the fruit of it, and the fruit are children.