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I think 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 Barthes The New Citroën (1957)

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More quotes by Roland Barthes

What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.

Mythologies (1957)

A work has two levels of meaning: literal and concealed.

The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself.

Mythologies (1957)

Literature is the question minus the answer.

By reducing any quality to quantity, myth economizes intelligence: it understands reality more cheaply.

Mythologies (1957)

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Fast, truly exciting cars are being killed off so that pretty soon the officers will all be gone, leaving us with a field full of enlisted men.

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Looking out a dirty old window; down below the cars in the city go rushing by. I sit here alone and I wonder why.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Roland Barthes (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.