Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech. — Roland Barthes Communication Copy Share Image
New York... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What "grace" might… — Roland Barthes Biography Copy Share Image
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much… — Roland Barthes Hysteria Copy Share Image
In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
L'amoureux qui n'oublie pas quelquefois meurt par exce' s, fatigue et tension de me moire (tel Werther). The lover who does not… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a… — Roland Barthes Fashion Copy Share Image
“It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them… — Roland Barthes Photographs Copy Share Image
The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent tings, but because on each occasion (i)it fills the sight by force(i), and… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“Everything began all over again immediately: arrival of manuscripts, requests, people’s stories, each person mercilessly pushing ahead his own little demand (for… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“The Tower is not a usual spectacle; to enter the Tower, to scale it, to run around its courses, is, in a… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“I transform "Work" in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real "Work" - of writing.) for: the… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“There is no sadness and no cruelty in that gaze; it is a gaze without adjectives, it is only, completely, a gaze… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“...The editors of (i)Life(i) rejected Kerész'a photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1937 because, they said, his images 'spoke… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“Paradoxically (since people say: Work, amuse yourself, see friends) it’s when we’re busy, distracted, sought out, exteriorized, that we suffer most. Inwardness,… — Roland Barthes Grief and loss Copy Share Image
“In order to satisfy this great oneiric function, which makes it not a kind of total monument, the [Eiffel] Tower must escape… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting… — Roland Barthes Alive Copy Share Image
“This book has two determinants: on the one hand, an ideological critique of the language of so-called mass culture; on the other,… — Roland Barthes Books Copy Share Image
Literature can no longer be either Mimesis or Mathesis but merely Semiosis, the adventure of what is impossible to language, in a… — Roland Barthes Adventure Copy Share Image
“To read is to struggle to name, to subject the sentences of a text to a semantic transformation. This transformation is erratic;… — Roland Barthes Books Copy Share Image
Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and… — Roland Barthes Class Copy Share Image
“I experience reality as a system of power. Coluche, the restaurant, the painter, Rome on a holiday, everything imposes on me its… — Roland Barthes Being Copy Share Image
Ensnared in his starvation, Chaplin-man is always just below political awareness. A strike is a catastrophe for him because it threatens a… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“(Love’s atopia, characteristic which causes it to escape all dissertations, would be that *ultimately* it is possible to talk about love only… — Roland Barthes Discourse Copy Share Image
Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? —This isn’t the same languor:… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“The modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or… — Roland Barthes Postmodernism Copy Share Image
“I waver—in the dark—between the observation (but is it entirely accurate?) that I’m unhappy only by moments, by jerks and surges, sporadically,… — Roland Barthes Death Copy Share Image
For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic… — Roland Barthes Bells Copy Share Image
There are two kinds of liberalism. A liberalism which is always, subterraneously authoritative and paternalistic, on the side of one's good conscience.… — Roland Barthes Conscience Copy Share Image
The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic)… — Roland Barthes Academic Copy Share Image
“I cannot countenance the traditional belief that postulates a natural dichotomy between the objectivity of the scientist and the subjectivity of the… — Roland Barthes Contradiction Copy Share Image
The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground,… — Roland Barthes August Copy Share Image
I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult. Thereby… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“To try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much… — Roland Barthes Love Copy Share Image
A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“Maman’s death: perhaps it is the one thing in my life that I have not responded to neurotically. My grief has not… — Roland Barthes Death Copy Share Image
![“In order to satisfy this great oneiric function, which makes it not a kind of total monument, the [Eiffel] Tower must escape reason. The first condition of this victorious flight is that the Tower be an utterly useless monument.” quote by Roland Barthes](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/118/roland-barthes-1062_eiffel-tower_in-order-to-satisfy-this-great-oneiric-f_1078821.jpg)
