Roland Barthes Quotes

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.

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.

There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.

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.

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.

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

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!

To eat steak rare ... represents both a nature and a morality.

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.