A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words?

paul martin lester

---

what others have said about words and pictures:

He who does not know the force of words cannot know people.
Confucius

The first picture was nothing but a line which surrounded the
shadow of a person by the sun upon a wall.
Leonardo Da Vinci

All words are prejudices.
Frederich Nietzsche

Nothing can be so deceiving as a photograph.
Franz Kafka

The difference between the right word and the almost right
word is the difference between lightning and lightning bug.
Mark Twain

The "Lord's Prayer" is 66 words, the "Gettysburg Address" is
286 words, there are 1,322 words in the "Declaration of
Independence," but government regulations on the sale
of cabbage total 26,911 words.
National Review, 10/24/95

A seven-character word (picture, for example) in most
word processing programs is a 6K file. One thousand
words is about 11k while 10,000 words is about 22K.
If Confucious said that a "picture's worth a thousand
(or ten thousand) words," he sure wasn't talking about
a color photograph on the cover of Newsweek,
but a simple 11k line drawing. In today's Hollywood,
a single digital frame for a motion picture requires
about 40megs of memory---that's equivalent to about
25 million words. Isn't it interesting to notice how 
pictures have increased in value over 2,500 years?
Paul Martin Lester

Thought is impossible without an image.
Aristotle