John Ruskin
[Artist, writer and poet, b. 1819, London, d. 1900, Coniston Water, England.]

 I tell you (dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well) a square inch of man’s engraving is worth all the photographs that were ever dipped in acid... Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud’s wax-work can do against sculpture. That and no more. (1865) 
 The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way... To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, all in one. 
 ... Amongst all the mechanical poison that this terrible nineteenth century has poured upon men, it has given us at any rate one antidote—the Daguerreotype. (1845) 
 No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases. 
 ... A power of obtaining veracity in the representation of material and tangible things, which, within certain limits and conditions, is unimpeachable, has now been placed in the hands of all men, almost without labour. (1853)