Raoul Vaneigem

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

— Raoul Vaneigem

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.

— Raoul Vaneigem

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

— Raoul Vaneigem

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

— Raoul Vaneigem

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

— Raoul Vaneigem

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.

— Raoul Vaneigem

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

— Raoul Vaneigem

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.

— Raoul Vaneigem

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.

— Raoul Vaneigem

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

— Raoul Vaneigem

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

— Raoul Vaneigem

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

— Raoul Vaneigem

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power.

— Raoul Vaneigem

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.

— Raoul Vaneigem

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

— Raoul Vaneigem

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.

— Raoul Vaneigem

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

— Raoul Vaneigem

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.

— Raoul Vaneigem