Quotes by Vaneigem, Raoul

"In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the"

Vaneigem, Raoul on death   

"In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create."

Vaneigem, Raoul on industry
4 fans of this quote   

"Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out."

Vaneigem, Raoul on insults   

"Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not."

Vaneigem, Raoul on knowledge   

"People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure, but of the use to which they are"

Vaneigem, Raoul on leisure   

"Production and consumption are the nipples of modern society. Thus suckled, humanity grows in strength and beauty; rising standard of living, all modern conveniences, distractions of all kinds, culture for all, the comfort of your dreams."

Vaneigem, Raoul on materialism   

"The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation."

Vaneigem, Raoul on materialism   

"Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it."

Vaneigem, Raoul on nature   

"The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself."

Vaneigem, Raoul on pleasure   

"As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life."

Vaneigem, Raoul on poverty and the poor   

"Purchasing power is a license to purchase power."

Vaneigem, Raoul on power   

"People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth."

Vaneigem, Raoul on evolution   

"To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects."

Vaneigem, Raoul on riches   

"Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own."

Vaneigem, Raoul on books - reading
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"Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live."

Vaneigem, Raoul on twentieth century   

"Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete."

Vaneigem, Raoul on work
3 fans of this quote   

"The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry."

Vaneigem, Raoul on work   

"We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity."

Vaneigem, Raoul on commonplace