Quote collection
180 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. In other countries, the business of laughing is left to the viewers. Here, their laughter is put on the screen, integrated into the show. It is the screen that is laughing and having a good time. You are simply left alone with your consternation."
"What I am, I don't know. I am the simulacrum of myself."
"To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light."
"There is no aphrodisiac like innocence."
"Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real."
"History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history."
"If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection."
"Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true ."
"The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true."
"Philosophy leads to death, sociology leads to suicide."
"Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and the geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windowsthe displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcitymimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity."
"When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning."
"It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him."
"Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated."
"[I]nside every computer, there is a hidden man being bored."
"The day the world ends, no one will be there, just as no one was there when it began. This is a scandal. Such a scandal for the human race that it is indeed capable collectively, out of spite, of hastening the end of the world by all means just so it can enjoy the show."
"Every woman is like a time-zone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night."
"It is not enough for theory to describe and analyze, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality."
"But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference."
"Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust."