Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.

Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.

All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.

[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!

Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].

Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.

You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.