Quotes by Baudrillard, Jean

"Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust."

Baudrillard, Jean on democracy   

"Depression moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur, our mood changes again, since the accident shows we can draw the world in our wake, and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power."

Baudrillard, Jean on depression
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"A society which allows an abominable event to burgeon from its dung heap and grow on its surface is like a man who lets a fly crawl unheeded across his face or saliva dribble from his mouth -- either epileptic or dead."

Baudrillard, Jean on events   

"Man has lost the basic skill of the ape, the ability to scratch its back. Which gave it extraordinary independence, and the liberty to associate for reasons other than the need for mutual back-scratching."

Baudrillard, Jean on evolution   

"We are no longer in a state of growth; we are in a state of excess. We are living in a society of excrescence. The boil is growing out of control, recklessly at cross purposes with itself, its impacts multiplying as the causes disintegrate."

Baudrillard, Jean on excess   

"Terror is as much a part of the concept of truth as runniness is of the concept of jam. We wouldn't like jam if it didn't, by its very nature, ooze. We wouldn't like truth if it wasn't sticky, if, from time to time, it didn't ooze blood."

Baudrillard, Jean on fear   

"Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors."

Baudrillard, Jean on feelings   

"There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world."

Baudrillard, Jean on festivals   

"Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future."

Baudrillard, Jean on fiction   

"Sadder than destitution, sadder than a beggar is the man who eats alone in public. Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honor of sharing or disputing each other's food."

Baudrillard, Jean on food and eating   

"In days gone by, we were afraid of dying in dishonor or a state of sin. Nowadays, we are afraid of dying fools. Now the fact is that there is no Extreme Unction to absolve us of foolishness. We endure it here on earth as subjective eternity."

Baudrillard, Jean on fools and foolishness   

"The liberated man is not the one who is freed in his ideal reality, his inner truth, or his transparency; he is the man who changes spaces, who circulates, who changes sex, clothes, and habits according to fashion, rather than morality, and who changes opinions not as his conscience dictates but in response to opinion polls."

Baudrillard, Jean on free will   

"As for freedom, it will soon cease to exist in any shape or form. Living will depend upon absolute obedience to a strict set of arrangements, which it will no longer be possible to transgress. The air traveler is not free. In the future, life's passengers will be even less so: they will travel through their lives fastened to their (corporate) seats."

Baudrillard, Jean on freedom   

"One of life's primal situations; the game of hide and seek. Oh, the delicious thrill of hiding while the others come looking for you, the delicious terror of being discovered, but what panic when, after a long search, the others abandon you! You mustn't hide too well. You mustn't be too good at the game. The player must never be bigger than the game itself."

Baudrillard, Jean on games   

"Genius is childhood recaptured."

Baudrillard, Jean on genius   

"What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world."

Baudrillard, Jean on america   

"Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society."

Baudrillard, Jean on america
3 fans of this quote   

"Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved -- commitment to a scenario."

Baudrillard, Jean on government   

"We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself."

Baudrillard, Jean on greatness   

"What is a society without a heroic dimension?"

Baudrillard, Jean on heroes and heroism   

"The sumptuous age of stars and images is reduced to a few artificial tornado effects, pathetic fake buildings, and childish tricks which the crowd pretends to be taken in by to avoid feeling too disappointed. Ghost towns, ghost people. The whole place has the same air of obsolescence about it as Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard."

Baudrillard, Jean on hollywood   

"Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary. He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination."

Baudrillard, Jean on hostages   

"We are all hostages, and we are all terrorists. This circuit has replaced that other one of masters and slaves, the dominating and the dominated, the exploiters and the exploited. It is worse than the one it replaces, but at least it liberates us from liberal nostalgia and the ruses of history."

Baudrillard, Jean on hostages   

"If we consider the superiority of the human species, the size of its brain, its powers of thinking, language and organization, we can say this: were there the slightest possibility that another rival or superior species might appear, on earth or elsewhere, man would use every means at his disposal to destroy it."

Baudrillard, Jean on humankind   

"It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are."

Baudrillard, Jean on identity   

"You need an infinite stretch of time ahead of you to start to think, infinite energy to make the smallest decision. The world is getting denser. The immense number of useless projects is bewildering. Too many things have to be put in to balance up an uncertain scale. You can't disappear anymore. You die in a state of total indecision."

Baudrillard, Jean on indecision   

"Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don't even arise."

Baudrillard, Jean on information   

"There is no aphrodisiac like innocence."

Baudrillard, Jean on innocence   

"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."

Baudrillard, Jean on language   

"Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence."

Baudrillard, Jean on language
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"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."

Baudrillard, Jean on laughter   

"Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly."

Baudrillard, Jean on life
5 fans of this quote   

"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."

Baudrillard, Jean on love
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"If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity."

Baudrillard, Jean on love
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"There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each. This is not just a stock of affects or pleasure, but also the possibility of playing double or quits with the share you hold in the other's heart."

Baudrillard, Jean on love   

"Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us."

Baudrillard, Jean on life   

"The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters -- there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void. That's why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window."

Baudrillard, Jean on media   

"Every woman is like a time-zone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night."

Baudrillard, Jean on women   

"We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures."

Baudrillard, Jean on modern and modernism   

"You are born modern, you do not become so."

Baudrillard, Jean on modern and modernism