Quotes by Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard

French sociologist and philosopher.

Lived from: 1929 - 2007

Category: History and sociology | Philosophers Country: FlagFrance

Born: 27 july 1929 Died: 6 march 2007

  • Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.
  • 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.
  • The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.
  • With the truth, you need to get rid of it as soon as possible and pass it on to someone else. As with illness, this is the only way to be cured of it. The person who keeps truth in his hands has lost.
  • 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.
  • There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.
  • 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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  • Contact with men who wield power and authority still leaves an intangible sense of repulsion. It's very like being in close proximity to fecal matter, the fecal embodiment of something unmentionable, and you wonder what it is made of and when it acquired its historically sacred character.
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  • If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.
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  • We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.
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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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  • A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.
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  • A society which allows an abominable event to burgeon from its dung heap and grow on its surface is like a man who lets a fly crawl unheeded across his face or saliva dribble from his mouth - either epileptic or dead.
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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.
    ― Jean Baudrillard
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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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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.
    ― Jean Baudrillard
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  • Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.
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  • Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.
    ― Jean Baudrillard
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  • Every woman is like a time-zone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night.
    ― Jean Baudrillard
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  • Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.
    ― Jean Baudrillard
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  • Executives are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an executive away from his business, he goes on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business. He never stops hurtling onwards, making decisions and executing them.
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  • Genius is childhood recaptured.
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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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  • 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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  • 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.
    ― Jean Baudrillard
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