Jean Baudrillard Quotes
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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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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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There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.
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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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One has never said better how much 'humanism', 'normality', 'quality of life' were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.
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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?
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You are born modern, you do not become so.
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Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.
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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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One day, we shall stand up and our backsides will remain attached to our seats.
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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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And so one can imagine that in amorous seduction the other is the locus of your secret - the other unknowingly holds that which you will never have the chance to know. (p. 65)
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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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Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.
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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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It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.
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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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Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.
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For nothing can be greater than seduction itself, not even the order that destroys it.
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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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Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.
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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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What is a society without a heroic dimension?