Guy Debord Quotes

32 Sourced Quotes

Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption... is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.

Guy Debord
Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Guy Debord
Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.

Guy Debord
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

Guy Debord
What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic. And what is genuine is reconstructed as quickly as possible, to resemble the false.

Guy Debord
The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.

Guy Debord
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

Guy Debord
There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.

Guy Debord
In the zone of perdition where my youth went as if to complete its education, one would have said that the portents of an imminent collapse of the whole edifice of civilization had made an appointment.

Guy Debord
The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle's estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual's gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.

Guy Debord
Everyone accepts that there are inevitably little areas of secrecy reserved for specialists; as regards things in general, many believe they are in on the secret.

Guy Debord
In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

Guy Debord
With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.

Guy Debord
People who personify the system are indeed well known for not being what they seem to be; they have achieved greatness by embracing a level of reality lower than that of the most insignificant individual life- and everyone knows it.

Guy Debord
Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.

Guy Debord
All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.

Guy Debord
As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specialisations that they actually live.

Guy Debord
He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with.

Guy Debord
I have written much less than most people who write; I have drunk much more than most people who drink.

Guy Debord
Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.

Guy Debord
The Mafia is not an outsider in this world; it is perfectly at home. Indeed, in the integrated spectacle it stands as the model of all advanced commercial enterprises.

Guy Debord
It is hardly surprising that children should enthusiastically start their education at an early age with the Absolute Knowledge of computer science; while they are unable to read, for reading demands making judgments at every line.... Conversation is almost dead, and soon so too will be those who knew how to speak.

Guy Debord
Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

Guy Debord
The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.

Guy Debord
Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Guy Debord
The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative.

Guy Debord
Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state's monopoly of armed violence.

Guy Debord
No longer is science asked to understand the world, or to improve any part of it. It is asked instead to immediately justify everything that happens.... spectacular domination has cut down the vast tree of scientific knowledge in order to make itself a truncheon.

Guy Debord
The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.

Guy Debord
Behind the masks of total choice, different forms of the same alienation confront each other.

Guy Debord