By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.

Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.

The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.

Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

History breaks down into images, not into stories.

The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.

Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.