Jean Baudrillard Quotes

145 Sourced Quotes

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.

Jean Baudrillard
Sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public.

Jean Baudrillard
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.

Jean Baudrillard
The microwave, the waste disposal, the orgasmic elasticity of the carpets, this soft resort-style civilization irresistibly evokes the end of the world.

Jean Baudrillard
Can one produce a finer parody of the ethics of value than by submit- ting oneself, with all the intransigence of virtue, to the outcomes of chance or the absurdity of a rule?

Jean Baudrillard
We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and smug in "the social," our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.

Jean Baudrillard
One has never said better how much "humanism", "normality", "quality of life" were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.

Jean Baudrillard
Not only does reality resist those who still criticize it, but it also abandons those who defend it. Maybe it is a way for reality to get its revenge from those who claim to believe in it for the sole purpose of eventually transforming it: sending back its supporters to their own desires.

Jean Baudrillard
As for freedom, it will soon cease to exist in any shape or form. Living will depend upon absolute obedience to a strict set of arrangements, which it will no longer be possible to transgress. The air traveler is not free. In the future, life's passengers will be even less so: they will travel through their lives fastened to their (corporate) seats.

Jean Baudrillard
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.

Jean Baudrillard
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.

Jean Baudrillard
This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere - that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness.

Jean Baudrillard
The neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone- remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygenic design- but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness.

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
Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.

Jean Baudrillard
The multiplication of individual sects should not fool us: the important point is that the whole of America is preoccupied with the sect as a moral institution, with its immediate demand for beatification, its material efficacity, its compulsion for justification, and doubtless also with its madness and frenzy.

Jean Baudrillard
Art does not die because there is no more art. It dies because there is too much.

Jean Baudrillard
The image is not a medium for which we have to find the proper use. It is what it is and it is beyond all our moral considerations. It is by its essence immoral, and the world's becoming-image is an immoral process.

Jean Baudrillard
Forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself.

Jean Baudrillard
Terrorism, like viruses, is everywhere. There is a global perfusion of terrorism, which accompanies any system of domination as though it were its shadow, ready to activate itself anywhere, like a double agent.

Jean Baudrillard
We are no longer dealing with historical events, but with places of collapse.

Jean Baudrillard
It is like the expanding universe. The more our instruments penetrate it, the further the limits recede.

Jean Baudrillard
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
Every photographed object is merely the trace left behind by the disappearance of all the rest. It is an almost perfect crime, an almost total resolution of the world, which merely leave the illusion of a particular object shining forth, the image of which then becomes an impenetrable enigma.

Jean Baudrillard
The age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials - worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, a more ductile material than meaning... It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself.

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
A successful object is one which exists beyond its own reality, which creates a dual (and not merely interactlve) relation (with its users also), a relation of contradiction, misappropriation and destablilisation.

Jean Baudrillard
Postmodernity is the simultaneity of the destruction of earlier values and their reconstruction. It is renovation within ruination.

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
Protect everything, detect everything, contain everything - obsessional society. Save time. Save money. Save our souls - phobic society. Low tar. Low energy. Low calories. Low sex. Low speed - anorexic society.

Jean Baudrillard