Roland Barthes Quotes

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.

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Very often (too often in my view) I was aware of being photographed. So, from the moment I feel I am in the camera's eye, everything changes I begin to pose, I immediately create a different body, I change even before the image.

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To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.

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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.

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There are two kinds of liberalism. A liberalism which is always, subterraneously authoritative and paternalistic, on the side of one's good conscience. And then there is a liberalism which is more ethical than political one would have to find another name for this. Something like a profound suspension of judgment.

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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.

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Inexpressible LoveTo know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love, to know that writing compensates for nothing..

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

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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.

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Literature is the question minus the answer.

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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.

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

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

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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.

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Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention. A drink is felt as the spinning out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect which is sought wine is not only a philter, it is also the leisurely act of drinking.

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To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art.

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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.

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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.

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

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To hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen the hiding must be seen I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve at one and the same time it must be known and not known I want you to know that I don't want to show my feelings that is the message I address to the other.

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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.

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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.

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

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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. . .

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

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