Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.

The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

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.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.

The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.