Quotes by Baudrillard, Jean

"If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams then you must still regard America today with the same naive enthusiasm as the generations that discovered the New World."

Baudrillard, Jean on world   

"The obese is in a total delirium. For he is not only large, of a size opposed to normal morphology: he is larger than large. He no longer makes sense in some distinctive opposition, but in his excess, his redundancy."

Baudrillard, Jean on obesity   

"The world is not dialectical -- it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil."

Baudrillard, Jean on opposites   

"Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other."

Baudrillard, Jean on paradise   

"The local is a shabby thing. There's nothing worse than bringing us back down to our own little corner, our own territory, the radiant promiscuity of the face to face. A culture which has taken the risk of the universal, must perish by the universal."

Baudrillard, Jean on places   

"If there is a species which is more maltreated than children, then it must be their toys, which they handle in an incredibly off-hand manner. Toys are thus the end point in that long chain in which all the conditions of despotic high-handedness are in play which enchain beings one to another, from one species to another --cruel divinities to their sacrificial victims, from masters to slaves, from adults to children, and from children to their objects."

Baudrillard, Jean on plays   

"The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence."

Baudrillard, Jean on politics   

"Politicians -- power itself -- are abject because they merely embody the profound contempt people have for their own lives. One should be grateful to the politicians for accepting the abstractness of power, and ridding others of its burden. This inevitably kills them but they get their revenge by passing onto others the corpse of power."

Baudrillard, Jean on politics   

"It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him."

Baudrillard, Jean on politics   

"The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it."

Baudrillard, Jean on politics   

"Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated."

Baudrillard, Jean on automobiles   

"I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?"

Baudrillard, Jean on bankers and banking   

"At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves."

Baudrillard, Jean on pornography   

"Pornography is the quadraphonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules. Science has already habituated us to this microscopics, this excess of the real in its microscopic detail, this voyeurism of exactitude."

Baudrillard, Jean on pornography   

"Contact with men who wield power and authority still leaves an intangible sense of repulsion. It's very like being in close proximity to fecal matter, the fecal embodiment of something unmentionable, and you wonder what it is made of and when it acquired its historically sacred character."

Baudrillard, Jean on power   

"The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real."

Baudrillard, Jean on reality   

"Mistakes, scandals, and failures no longer signal catastrophe. The crucial thing is that they be made credible, and that the public be made aware of the efforts being expended in that direction. The marketing immunity of governments is similar to that of the major brands of washing powder."

Baudrillard, Jean on scandal   

"In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning."

Baudrillard, Jean on scholars and scholarship   

"The price we pay for the complexity of life is too high. When you think of all the effort you have to put in --telephonic, technological and relational --to alter even the slightest bit of behavior in this strange world we call social life, you are left pining for the straightforwardness of primitive peoples and their physical work."

Baudrillard, Jean on simplicity   

"Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile."

Baudrillard, Jean on smile
3 fans of this quote   

"Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment."

Baudrillard, Jean on statistics   

"The order of the world is always right -- such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin."

Baudrillard, Jean on status quo   

"Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face."

Baudrillard, Jean on bores and boredom
3 fans of this quote   

"Executives are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an executive away from his business, he goes on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business. He never stops hurtling onwards, making decisions and executing them."

Baudrillard, Jean on business   

"The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it."

Baudrillard, Jean on change
16 fans of this quote   

"Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things."

Baudrillard, Jean on vision   

"There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you."

Baudrillard, Jean on vision   

"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."

Baudrillard, Jean on theory   

"The surprises of thought are like those of love: they wear out. But here too you can carry on for a long time doing your conjugal duty."

Baudrillard, Jean on thoughts and thinking   

"With the truth, you need to get rid of it as soon as possible and pass it on to someone else. As with illness, this is the only way to be cured of it. The person who keeps truth in his hands has lost."

Baudrillard, Jean on truth   

"As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their oscillated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains."

Baudrillard, Jean on twentieth century   

"Holidays are in no sense an alternative to the congestion and bustle of cities and work. Quite the contrary. People look to escape into an intensification of the conditions of ordinary life, into a deliberate aggravation of those conditions: further from nature, nearer to artifice, to abstraction, to total pollution, to well above average levels of stress, pressure, concentration and monotony -- this is the ideal of popular entertainment. No one is interested in overcoming alienation; the point is to plunge into it to the point of ecstasy. That is what holidays are for."

Baudrillard, Jean on vacation   

"Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void."

Baudrillard, Jean on vision   

"We have dreamt of every woman there is, and dreamt too of the miracle that would bring us the pleasure of being a woman, for women have all the qualities -- courage, passion, the capacity to love, cunning -- whereas all our imagination can do is naively pile up the illusion of courage."

Baudrillard, Jean on women   

"A woman spent all Christmas Day in a telephone box without ringing anyone. If someone comes to phone, she leaves the box, then resumes her place afterwards. No one calls her either, but from a window in the street, someone watched her all day, no doubt since they had nothing better to do. The Christmas syndrome."

Baudrillard, Jean on christmas   

"Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake."

Baudrillard, Jean on life   

"The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism."

Baudrillard, Jean on life   

"The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night."

Baudrillard, Jean on civilization   

"The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence."

Baudrillard, Jean on computers   

"Computer science only indicates the retrospective omnipotence of our technologies. In other words, an infinite capacity to process data (but only data -- i.e. the already given) and in no sense a new vision. With that science, we are entering an era of exhaustivity, which is also an era of exhaustion."

Baudrillard, Jean on computers