Top 20 Quotes by Roland Barthes

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

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.

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

Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.

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.

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.

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.

What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.

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

Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.