Gordon Parks Quotes

#1. And now, I feel at 85, I really feel that I'm just ready to start.

Gordon Parks

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

Gordon Parks

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

Gordon Parks

#4. Think in terms of images and words. They can be mighty powerful when they are fitted together properly.

Gordon Parks

#5. Washington, D.C. in 1942 was not the easiest place in the world for a Negro to get along.

Gordon Parks

#6. I have never known anyone important enough to consume me in anger beyond a few hours. Better to depart their existence before they poison your own.

Gordon Parks

#7. 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.

Gordon Parks

#8. I was there less than a year before I was assigned to the Paris bureau. I spent two years there and, in fact, before I even went on the staff I was sent to Europe to do assignments which they wouldn't normally do for a young photographer just starting out.

Gordon Parks

#9. But I do feel a little teeny right now that I'm just about ready to start, and winter is entering. Half past autumn has arrived.

Gordon Parks

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

Gordon Parks

#11. I have been born again and again and each time, I have found something to love.

Gordon Parks

#12. I've been asked if I think there will ever come a time when all people come together. I would like to think there will. All we can do is hope and dream and work toward that end. And that's what I've tried to do all my life.

Gordon Parks

#13. 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.

Gordon Parks

#14. Success can be wracking and reproachful, to you and those close to you. It can entangle you with legends that are consuming and all but impossible to live up to.

Gordon Parks

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

Gordon Parks

#16. I bought my first camera in Seattle, Washington. Only paid about seven dollars and fifty cents for it.

Gordon Parks

#17. 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.

Gordon Parks

#18. There's another horizon out there, one more horizon that you have to make for yourself and let other people discover it, and someone else will take it further on, you know.

Gordon Parks

#19. 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.

Gordon Parks

#20. You know, the camera is not meant just to show misery.

Gordon Parks

#21. I'd become sort of involved in things that were happening to people. No matter what color they be, whether they be Indians, or Negroes, the poor white person or anyone who was I thought more or less getting a bad shake.

Gordon Parks

#22. I think maybe the rural influence in my life helped me in a sense, of knowing how to get close to people and talk to them and get my work done.

Gordon Parks

#23. I had known poverty firsthand, but there I learned how to fight its evil - along with the evil of racism - with a camera.

Gordon Parks

#24. I've been with Life now for seventeen years and I have written several articles for them and will be doing more writing and do at least two assignments a year besides my writing.

Gordon Parks

#25. I have always felt as though I needed a weapon against evil.

Gordon Parks

#26. Use anger to emotionalize whatever thing you intend to do in life - being a painter, a poet or a photographer

Gordon Parks

#27. I suffered first as a child from discrimination, poverty ... So I think it was a natural follow from that that I should use my camera to speak for people who are unable to speak for themselves.

Gordon Parks

#28. I was born to a black childhood of confusion and poverty. The memory of that beginning influences my work today, It is impossible now to photograph a hungry child without remembering the hunger of my old childhood.

Gordon Parks

#29. The camera could be a very powerful instrument against discrimination, against poverty, against racism.

Gordon Parks

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

Gordon Parks

#31. I think most people can do a whole lot more if they just try.

Gordon Parks

#32. Many times I wondered whether my achievement was worth the loneliness I experienced, but now I realize the price was small.

Gordon Parks

#33. The man at Kodak told me the shots were very good and if I kept it up, they would give me an exhibition. Later, Kodak gave me my first exhibition.

Gordon Parks

#34. Photography was my choice of weapons.

Gordon Parks

#35. I do find a certain fascination with the unpredictable. The transitory years we wade through are what they are- what we make of them.

Gordon Parks

#36. But I was very disappointed that I didn't get a chance to go overseas with that group, might not have gotten back but I wanted very much to go because there's not much of a record of the exploits of the first Negro fighter group.

Gordon Parks

#37. If a man can reach the latter days of his life with his soul intact, he has mastered life.

Gordon Parks

#38. 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)

Gordon Parks

#39. 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.

Gordon Parks

#40. I suffered evils, but without allowing them to rob me of the freedom to expand.

Gordon Parks

#41. People in millenniums ahead will know what we were like in the 1930's and the thing that, the important major things that shaped our history at that time. This is as important for historic reasons as any other.

Gordon Parks

#42. The photographer begins to feel big and bloated and so big he can't walk through one of these doors because he gets a good byline; he gets notices all over the world and so forth; but they're really - the important people are the people he photographs.

Gordon Parks

#43. And I think that after nearly 85 years upon this planet that I have a right after working so hard at showing the desolation and the poverty, to show something beautiful for somebody as well.

Gordon Parks