Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don't become inured to what they are shown — if that's the right way to describe what happens — because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.

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

God, living is enormous!

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

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