Quotes by Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes

French writer, literary critic, linguist and philosopher

Lived from: 1915 - 1980

Category: Philosophers | Media | Writers (Contemporary) Country: FlagFrance

Born: 12 november 1915 Died: 26 march 1980

Quotes 1 till 19 of 19.

  • The New is not a fashion, it is a value.
    ― Roland Barthes
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  • There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
    ― Roland Barthes
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  • 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.
    ― Roland Barthes
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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.
    ― Roland Barthes
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  • I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
    ― Roland Barthes
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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.
    ― Roland Barthes
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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.
    ― Roland Barthes
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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.
    ― Roland Barthes
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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.
    ― Roland Barthes
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  • Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
    ― Roland Barthes
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  • Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.
    ― Roland Barthes
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  • 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
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  • The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event.
    ― Roland Barthes
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  • The photographic image... is a message without a code.
    ― Roland Barthes
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  • 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
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  • 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
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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.
    ― Roland Barthes
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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.
    ― Roland Barthes
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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 café to the speech at a formal dinner.
    ― Roland Barthes
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