AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.

The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste.

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.

The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.