So I went to Chicago in 1940, I think, '41, and the photographs that I made there, aside from fashion, were things that I was trying to express in a social conscious way.

I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs. I knew at that point I had to have a camera.

The guy who takes a chance, who walks the line between the known and unknown, who is unafraid of failure, will succeed.

I feel it is the heart, not the eye, that should determine the content of the photograph. What the eye sees is its own. What the heart can perceive is a very different matter.

Enthusiasm is the electricity of life. How do you get it? You act enthusiastic until you make it a habit.

At first I wasn't sure that I had the talent, but I did know I had a fear of failure, and that fear compelled me to fight off anything that might abet it.

Nothing came easy. I was just born with a need to explore every part of my mind. And with long searching and hard work, I became devoted to my restlessness.

You have a 45mm automatic pistol on your lap, and I have a 35mm camera on my lap, and my weapon is just as powerful as yours. (To Black Panther militant Eldridge Cleaver)

I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty.

If you don't have anything to say, your photographs aren't going to say much.

The subject matter is so much more important than the photographer.

We may not choose apathy, but when we choose anything other than love and empathetic justice, we get apathy by default.

Knowledge is not skill. Knowledge plus ten thousand times is skill.

Oh the saddest of sights in a world of sin Is the little lost pup with his tail tucked in.

I just try to be more creative and come with something new because I actually care about the music.

A man ain't got no right to be a public man, unless he meets the public views.

We are taught not to perceive but to avoid direct perceptions of reality and to substitute instead this kind of one-dimensional view of life.

Just because you escape one trap, doesn't mean you will escape the next.

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies.

Where there are two people, there is untruth.