Jean Baudrillard Quotes
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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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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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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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One has never said better how much 'humanism', 'normality', 'quality of life' were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.
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There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.
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You are born modern, you do not become so.
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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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Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.
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One day, we shall stand up and our backsides will remain attached to our seats.
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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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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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It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.