By itself photography cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the internal, the abstract, it does not speak of Man, only of a man ; not of Tree, only a tree.

We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.

People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.

The shock of twentieth-century technology numbed our brains and we are just beginning to notice the spiritual and social debris that our technology has strewn about us.

In Russia, writers with serious grievances are arrested, while in America they are merely featured on television talk shows, where all that is arrested is their development.

The idea of taking what people call the 'entertainment culture' as a focus of study, including historical perspective, is not a bad idea.

We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers-that is to say, as markets.