Jean Baudrillard Quotes
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The simulacrum is never what hides the truth - it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true. - Ecclesiastes
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The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.
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Seduction is the world’s elementary dynamic… All this has changed significantly for us, at least in appearance. For what has happened to good and evil? Seduction hurls them against one another, and unites them beyond meaning, in a paroxysm sudden outbreak of emotion of intensity and charm. (p. 59)
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Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.
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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.
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Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.
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A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. (p. 30)
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Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.
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Not only does reality resist those who still criticize it, but it also abandons those who defend it. Maybe it is a way for reality to get its revenge from those who claim to believe in it for the sole purpose of eventually transforming it: sending back its supporters to their own desires.
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Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.
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Challenge, and not desire, lies at the heart of seduction. (p. 57)
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Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
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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.
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The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.
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It is perhaps not a surprise that photography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality started to disappear. It is even perhaps the disappearance of reality that triggered this technical form. Reality found a way to mutate into an image.
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There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.
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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.
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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.
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We will never know if an advertisement or opinion poll has had a real influence on individual or collective wills, but we will never know either what would have happened if there had been no opinion poll or advertisement.
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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?