Jean Baudrillard Quotes

145 Sourced Quotes

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.

Jean Baudrillard
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.

Jean Baudrillard
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
There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.

Jean Baudrillard
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.

Jean Baudrillard
It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.

Jean Baudrillard
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.

Jean Baudrillard
To challenge and to cope with this paradoxical state of things, we need a paradoxical way of thinking; since the world drifts into delirium, we must adopt a delirious point of view. We must no longer assume any principle of truth, of causality, or any discursive norm. Instead, we must grant both the poetic singularity of events and the radical uncertainty of events. It is not easy. We usually think that holding to the protocols of experimentation and verification is the most difficult thing. But in fact the most difficult thing is to renounce the truth and the possibility of verification, to remain as long as possible on the enigmatic, ambivalent, and reversible side of thought.

Jean Baudrillard
The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.

Jean Baudrillard
The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.

Jean Baudrillard
It is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality.

Jean Baudrillard
One of the pleasures of travel is to dive into places where others are compelled to live and come out unscathed, full of the malicious pleasure of abandoning them to their fate.

Jean Baudrillard
Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.

Jean Baudrillard
Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory. Men have only had an unconscious since they lost a territory.

Jean Baudrillard
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
Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.

Jean Baudrillard
Distinctive signs, full signs, never seduce us.

Jean Baudrillard
One may dream of a culture where everyone bursts into laughter when someone says: this is true, this is real.

Jean Baudrillard
We can no longer say things appear unintelligible because science does not know enough about them. It seems that the more we know about them, the more unintelligible they become.

Jean Baudrillard
We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.

Jean Baudrillard
The Marxist critique is only a critique of capital, a critique coming from the heart of the middle and petit bourgeois classes, for which Marxism has served for a century as a latent ideology…. The Marxist seeks a good use of economy. Marxism is therefore only a limited petit bourgeois critique, one more step in the banalization of life toward the "good use" of the social!

Jean Baudrillard
As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their oscillated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.

Jean Baudrillard
It is perhaps not a surprise that photography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality started to disappear. It is even perhaps the disappearance of reality that triggered this technical form. Reality found a way to mutate into an image.

Jean Baudrillard
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.

Jean Baudrillard
We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.

Jean Baudrillard