Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
Roland BarthesRead
Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Speech shapes our understanding and can enforce power dynamics in society.
Roland Barthes highlights the relationship between language and power, positing that language serves as a form of legislation that governs societal norms, while speech acts as its code. He suggests that we often overlook the potential oppression embedded in classifications, which can marginalize voices and reinforce hierarchies within communication.
Themes
LanguageSpeechPowerClassificationOppression
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of inclusive language in social justice movements.
More from Roland Barthes
All quotes →If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a "weakness" or an "absurdity": it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.)
Roland BarthesRead
The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other.
Roland BarthesRead
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
Roland BarthesRead
I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.
Roland BarthesRead
All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.
Roland BarthesRead
Similar quotes
I believe it was God's will that we should come back, so that men might know the things that are in the world, since, as we have said in the first chapter of this book, no other man, Christian or Saracen, Mongol or pagan, has explored so much of the world as Messer Marco, son of Messer Niccolo Polo, great and noble citizen of the city of Venice.
Marco PoloRead
Free will is "corrupted nature's deformed darling, the Pallas or beloved self-conception of darkened minds"
John OwenRead
Since life is an ever evolving process, one should flow in this process and discover how to actualize and expand oneself.
Bruce LeeRead
Think how different human societies would be if they were based on love rather than justice. But no such societies have ever existed on earth.
Mortimer AdlerRead
No evil can happen to a good man either in life or after death.
PlatoRead
God help us from those who believe that they are the sole possessors of truth. How we manage at times to agree willingly to become prisoners within our own minds and souls of beliefs and ideas on which we can never be flexible.
King Hussein IRead