338 Quotes by Roland Barthes

Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.

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.

The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.

The new is not a fashion, it is a value.

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.

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

Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.

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.