Philip Jones Griffiths Quotes

#1. I love irony in pictures. There's one photograph from Vietnam by Philip Jones Griffiths that shows a very large GI having his pocket picked by a tiny Vietnamese woman. It told the whole story of the clash of two cultures and how the invader could never win.

John Pilger

#2. Sometimes I think I'm an artist. Once in a great while I even think I may be a visionary, but never a prophet, a seer.

Henry Miller

#3. I will get things done for America ... Faced with apathy, I will take action. Faced with conflict, I will seek common ground ... Faced with adversity, I will persevere. I will carry this commitment with me this year. I am an Americorps volunteer.

William J. Clinton

#4. We are there with our cameras to record reality. Once we start modifying that which exists, we are robbing photography of its most valuable attribute.

Philip Jones Griffiths

#5. People believe pictures. It's a photograph that's in your passport, not a painting. Now,
George Bernard Shaw said, 'I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot.' That's what the power of photography is.

Philip Jones Griffiths

#6. Conservatives highlight the primacy of family and argue that family breakdown exacerbates poverty, and they're right. Children raised by single parents are three times as likely to live in poverty as kids in two-parent homes.

Nicholas Kristof

#7. With the suggestion of a compromise Gawaine mustered up enough courage to speak.
"What will you do if I surrender?" he asked.
"Why, I'll eat you," said the dragon.
"And if I don't surrender?"
"I'll eat you just the same.

Heywood Broun

#8. What we get to think and know about the world is in the hands of a very few ... A truly informed public is antithetical to the interests of modern consumer capital.

Philip Jones Griffiths

#9. Real photography is a wonderfully inclusive, democratic medium, whereas art photography is more often a private pursuit by conmen.

Philip Jones Griffiths

#10. Even if not a single picture is never published, they exist. And that means that we are recording the history of the human race. If that's all your doing, it still a very very worth while profession to be involved in.

Philip Jones Griffiths

#11. All that I have to say has already crossed your mind,' said he. "'Then possibly my answer has crossed yours,' I replied.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#12. Our nation will prosper or decline in direct proportion to our selection of leaders who are guided by the Holy Spirit. If we fail to select Godly leaders our destiny will surely be as that of the Roman Empire.

Ronald Reagan

#13. When Bill Gates started Corbis we were told that he needed images to fill those digital picture frames in his home, and many found this plausible. But now it's pretty clear that he's set out to control the visual history of the twentieth century.

Philip Jones Griffiths

#14. He looked on people, and he neither liked nor disliked them. He looked on life and was neither heartened nor saddened.

Margaret Mitchell

#15. The ability to keep things in perspective is very important for a journalist. In a tense situation you need the ability to be there, yet somehow step aside; to keep a cool head and keep working without getting frustrated.

Philip Jones Griffiths

#16. [Photojournalism] really is the only branch of photography that's a credit to our profession. We see, we understand; we see more, we understand more.

Philip Jones Griffiths

#17. And so I recognized that my sojourn into open-heart territory was ultimately an open heart journey in another sense, a spiritual journey of awakening - to the reality that I am here in this life with a purpose, and have been from the day I was born.

Maggie Lichtenberg

#18. I attempt to channel my anger into the tip of my forefinger as I press the shutter.

Philip Jones Griffiths

#19. Content alone is propaganda; form alone is wallpaper.

Philip Jones Griffiths

#20. It is only by starting at an unusually young age and by practicing with such ferocious devotion that it is possible to accumulate ten thousand hours while still in adolescence. Far from being an exception to the ten-thousand-hour rule, Mozart is a shining testament to it.

Matthew Syed

#21. The only thing we photographers really want more than life, more than sex, more than anything, is to be invisible.

Philip Jones Griffiths

#22. The first picture of his I ever saw was during a lecture at the Rhyl camera club. I was 16 and the speaker was Emrys Jones. He projected the picture upside down. Deliberately, to disregard the subject matter to reveal the composition. It's a lesson I've never forgotten.

Philip Jones Griffiths