"The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!"
Encratic language (the language produced and spread under the protecti — Roland Barthes
"Encratic language (the language produced and spread under the protection of power) is statutorily a language of repetition; all official institutions of language are repeating machines: schools, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words."

Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism, and influenced the development of multiple schools of theory.
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism, and influenced the development of multiple schools of theory.
View all quotes by Roland BarthesMore by Roland Barthes
View all →"The bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named."
"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire."
"The bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth."
"Bourgeois norms are experienced as the evident laws of a natural order—the further the bourgeois class propagates its representations, the more naturalized they become."
"Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all history. In it, history evaporates."
More on Education
View all →"The absolute requisites for the study of this work... are a knowledge of algebra to the binomial at least, plane and solid geometry, plane trigonometry, and the most simple part of the usual applications of algebra to geometry. ...A. De Morgan. London July 1, 1836"
"Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading."
"Ive been taking a closer look at these graduates. They are actually taller, stronger, smarter than we were, smart enough maybe to take our mistakes as their messages, to make our weaknesses their lessons, and to make our example — good and not so good — part of their education."
"In short, it is not merely that Johnny cant read, or even that Johnny cant think. Johnny doesnt know what thinking is, because thinking is so often confused with feeling in many public schools. [emphasis in the original]"
"Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education & free discussion are the antidotes of both."
"Im very sad that this seems to be the No. 1 question people want to discuss. I had nothing to do with the issue other than what the media created. I was innocently drawn into the whole controversy. So, after many years, Im glad at least now that I have been given the opportunity to explain to the public and fans my side of the story in my own words. At a lecture, back in 1989, I was asked a question about blasphemy according to Islamic Law, I simply repeated the legal view according to my limited knowledge of the Scriptural texts, based directly on historical commentaries of the Quran. The next day the newspaper headlines read, "Cat Says, Kill Rushdie." I was abhorred, but what could I do? I was a new Muslim. If you ask a Bible student to quote the legal punishment of a person who commits blasphemy in the Bible, he would be dishonest if he didnt mention Leviticus 24:16."