Jean Baudrillard Quotes
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There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each. This is not just a stock of affects or pleasure, but also the possibility of playing double or quits with the share you hold in the other's heart.
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Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.
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One has never said better how much 'humanism', 'normality', 'quality of life' were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.
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The simulacrum now hides, not the truth, but the fact that there is none, that is to say, the continuation of Nothingness.
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There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.
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One day, we shall stand up and our backsides will remain attached to our seats.
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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.
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You are born modern, you do not become so.
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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.
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Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.
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It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.
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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.
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Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.
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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.
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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.
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There are only a few images that are not forced to provide meaning, or have to go through the filter of a specific idea.
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We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.
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It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours: The desert of the real itself.
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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.
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For nothing can be greater than seduction itself, not even the order that destroys it.
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What is a society without a heroic dimension?
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THERE IS NEVER ANYTHING TO PRO-DUCE. In spite of all its materialist efforts, production remains a utopia. We can wear ourselves out in materializing things, in rendering them visible, but we will never cancel the secret. (p. 65)
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Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.
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There are cultures that can only picture their origins and not their ends. Some are obsessed by both. Two other positions are possible: only picturing one's end - our own culture; picturing neither beginning nor end - the coming culture.