32 Quotes About Semiotics

One picture is worth a thousand words. Yes, but only if you look at the picture and say or think the thousand words

Nothing is more important than who controls the signs. To change the world, it is necessary to change the signs that are used to condition people.

Derrida s’intéressait moins au roman qu’à l’écriture, et ce qui l’a fasciné c’est le fait que j’ai fait de l’écriture un roman.

Barthes me lisait, donc on s’est rencontrés.

The universal logo for a pizzahut is eight slices painted cross a disc of yellow plywood mounted in the mouth of a taxidermic hippopotapus.

(A squeeze of the hand—enormous documentation—a tiny gesture within the palm, a knee which doesn't move away, an arm extended, as if quite naturally, along the back of a sofa and against which the other's head gradually comes to rest—this is the paradisiac realm of subtle and clandestine signs: a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning.)

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produces no concept; therefore, it is dumb.

I had fallen in love. What I mean is: I had begun to recognize, to isolate the signs of one of those from the others, in fact I waited for these signs I had begun to recognize, I sought them, responded to those signs I awaited with other signs I made myself, or rather it was I who aroused them, these signs from her, which I answered with other signs of my own . . .

The transference of culture in time can, in large measure, be described as the conservation of sign systems serving as a control on behavior.