Popular

Browse Popular Topics

Quotes by Roland Barthes

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
– Roland Barthes
All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
– 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
Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. The bourgeois and proletariat classes have become abstractions: the petite-bourgeoisie, in contrast, is everywhere, you can see it everywhere, even in the areas of the bourgeois and the proletariat, what's left of them.
– Roland Barthes
I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
– Roland Barthes
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
I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.
– Roland Barthes
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
Literature is the question minus the answer.
– Roland Barthes
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.
– Roland Barthes
The New is not a fashion, it is a value.
– Roland Barthes
The photographic image... is a message without a code.
– Roland Barthes
There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.
– Roland Barthes
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
– Roland Barthes
Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack to the feast, from the conversation at the local cafT to the speech at a formal dinner.
– Roland Barthes
Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
– Roland Barthes
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