The Oppressor Would Not Be Strong Without Accomplices Among The Oppressed

Mystification of power is one of the forms of oppression;
Ignorance is a situation in which man may be enclosed as narrowly as in a prison;

...every individual may practice his freedom inside his world, but not everyone has the means of rejecting, even by doubt, the values, taboos, and prescriptions by which he is surrounded;

...doubtless, respectful minds take the object of their respect for their own;

in this sense they are responsible for it, as they are responsible for their presence in the world: but they are not guilty if their adhesion is not a resignation of their freedom.

The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity.

To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won.

Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.

"We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there."

"This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures."

"Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman." (- the witty luddite's book of philology)