The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable.

Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.

That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.

The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.

There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things.