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)
Literature is the question minus the answer. (Roland Barthes)
What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. (Roland Barthes)
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! (Roland Barthes)
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. (Roland Barthes)
What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth. (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)
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)
The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man. (Roland Barthes)
The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning. (Roland Barthes)
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see. (Roland Barthes)
Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion. (Roland Barthes)
The photographic image... is a message without a code. (Roland Barthes)
I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient. (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)