Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.
Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
There are only a few images that are not forced to provide meaning, or have to go through the filter of a specific idea.
It is exciting to hear one of your fondest ideas formulated in one fell swoop, better than you could have done yourself.
Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.
Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory. Men have only had an unconscious since they lost a territory.
We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.
The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.
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.
One has never said better how much "humanism", "normality", "quality of life" were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.
Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.
Postmodernity is the simultaneity of the destruction of earlier values and their reconstruction. It is renovation within ruination.
It is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality.
Every woman is like a time-zone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night.
Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.
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.
This is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.
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.
Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world. This is as marvelous as being there in the beginning.
There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.
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.
It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us unintelligibly, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.
For the heavenly fire no longer strikes depraved cities, it is rather the lens which cuts through ordinary reality like a laser, putting it to death.
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.
Information...exhausts itself in the staging of meaning...[and leads] not at all to a surfeit of innovation but to the very contrary, to total entropy
In its artless cruelty, Dallas is superior to any "intelligent" critique that can be made of it. That is why intellectual snobberymeets its match here.
In our culture, futility plays the role of transgression and fashion is condemned for having within it the force of the pure sign which signifies nothing.
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.
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.
Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.
So-called "realist" photography does not capture the "what is." Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.
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.
Y a-t-il plus belle parodie de l'éthique de la valeur que de se soumettre avec toute l'intransigeance de la vertu aux données du hasard ou à l'absurdité d'une règle?
You think you photograph a particular scene for the pleasure it gives. In fact it's the scene that wants to be photographed. You're merely an extra in the production.
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.
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.
It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire but our own: The desert of the real itself.
All of [the] activities here have a surreptitious end-of-the-world feel to them:... these joggers sleepwalking in the mist like shadow's who have escaped from Plato's cave
Simulation is the situation created by any system of signs when it becomes sophisticated enough, autonomous enough, to abolish its own referent and to replace it with itself.
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.
One of the pleasures of travel is to dive into places where others are compelled to live and come out unscathed, full of the malicious pleasure of abandoning them to their fate.
Images have become our true sex objects. It is this promiscuity and the ubiquity of images, this viral contamination of images which are the fatal characteristics of our culture.
The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning.
the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone- remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygenic design- but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness.
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.
The new shopping malls make possible the synthesis of all consumer activities, not least of which are shopping, flirting with objects, idle wandering, and all the permutations of these.
The confrontation between America and Europe reveals not so much a rapprochement as a distortion, an unbridgeable rift. There isn't just a gap between us, but a whole chasm of modernity.
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.
If you assume any rate of improvement at all then the games will become indistinguishable from reality. It would seem to follow that the odds that we are in base reality would be one in billions.