Photographers are always imposing

Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.

Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen: thus Smith's Minamata photographs will seem different on a contact sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a photographic magazine, in a book, on a living-room wall. Each o these situations suggest a different use for the photographs but none can secure their meaning.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.

One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.