When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

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

Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.

Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms.