Phil Stern
[Photographer, b. 1919, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 2014, Los Angeles.]
You point a camera, and you push the button. The only trouble is that your life is at stake, and I came close to being killed quite a few times. But it turns out that everything seems to work in my favor. God apparently is very generous to atheists. He fucks the believers. That’s my observation.
(On his time as a WWII army photographer.) 
Chester Higgins
[Photographer, b. 1946, Lexington, Kentucky, lives in Brooklyn, New York.]
What has always driven my photography is the search for the spirit of things.
Arnold Genthe
[Photographer, b. 1869, Berlin, Germany, d. 1942, New York.]
Of the pictures I had made during the fire, there are several, I believe, that will be of lasting interest. There is particularly the one scene that I recorded the morning of the first day of the fire which shows, in a pictorially effective composition, the results of the earthquake, the beginning of the fire and the attitude of the people. On the right is a house, the front of which had collapsed into the street. The occupants are sitting on chairs calmly watching the approach of the fire. Groups of people are standing in the street, motionless, gazing at the clouds of smoke. When the fire crept up close, they would just move up a block. It is hard to believe that such a scene actually occurred in the way the photograph represents it. Several people upon seeing it have exclaimed, “Oh, is that a still from a Cecil De Mille picture?” To which the answer has been, “No, the director of this scene was the Lord himself.”
(On photographing the San Francisco earthquake of 1906)
John Pfahl
[Photographer, b. 1939, New York, lives in Buffalo, New York.]
People think the camera steals their soul. Places, I am convinced, are affected in the opposite direction. The more they are photographed (or drawn and painted) the more soul they seem to accumulate.
Emmet Gowin
[Photographer, b. 1941, Danville, Virginia, lives in Princeton, New Jersey.]
This is the gift of the landscape photograph, that the heart finds a place to stand.
Jean Baudrillard
[Writer and theorist, b. 1929, Reims, France, d. 2007, Paris.]
The image is not a medium for which we have to find the proper use. It is what it is and it is beyond all our moral considerations. It is by its essence immoral, and the world’s becoming-image is an immoral process.
Beaumont Newhall
[Photographer, writer, and historian, b. 1908, Lynn, Massachusetts, d. 1993, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
Photography—the spirit, I mean—is everywhere: it’s precise, lightning-like, clean cut, brilliant, alert.
God (Judeo-Christian Version)
[Omnipotent artist, critic, creator and destroyer, before time, lives everywhere and nowhere.]
Recognize what is in your sight and what is hidden will become clear to you.
(Judeo-Christian version of God; Jesus, Gospel of Thomas 5)
