Jean Baudrillard Quotes

145 Sourced Quotes

You think you photograph a particular scene for the pleasure it gives. In fact it's the scene that wants to be photographed. You're merely an extra in the production.

Jean Baudrillard
Power is only too happy to make football bear a diabolical responsibility for stupifying the masses

Jean Baudrillard
The sickly cultural pathos which the whole of France indulges in, that fetishism of the cultural heritage.

Jean Baudrillard
Mistakes, scandals, and failures no longer signal catastrophe. The crucial thing is that they be made credible, and that the public be made aware of the efforts being expended in that direction. The marketing immunity of governments is similar to that of the major brands of washing powder.

Jean Baudrillard
The repentant, run-to-seed ultra-Leftists who have converted to humanitarianism, artificial inseminators of the widow and the orphan, themselves orphans of reality and malades imaginaires of politics, premature ejaculators of posthistory and hyperchondriacs of the dead body of ideology and morality.

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

Jean Baudrillard
Computer science only indicates the retrospective omnipotence of our technologies. In other words, an infinite capacity to process data (but only data -- i.e. the already given) and in no sense a new vision. With that science, we are entering an era of exhaustivity, which is also an era of exhaustion.

Jean Baudrillard
In its artless cruelty, Dallas is superior to any "intelligent" critique that can be made of it. That is why intellectual snobberymeets its match here.

Jean Baudrillard
Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.

Jean Baudrillard
The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.

Jean Baudrillard
The sumptuous age of stars and images is reduced to a few artificial tornado effects, pathetic fake buildings, and childish tricks which the crowd pretends to be taken in by to avoid feeling too disappointed. Ghost towns, ghost people. The whole place has the same air of obsolescence about it as Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard.

Jean Baudrillard
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.

Jean Baudrillard
Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened.

Jean Baudrillard
Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.

Jean Baudrillard
Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.

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
The confrontation between America and Europe reveals not so much a rapprochement as a distortion, an unbridgeable rift. There isn't just a gap between us, but a whole chasm of modernity.

Jean Baudrillard
Today, every principle of identity is affected by fashion, precisely because of its potential to revert all forms to non-origin and recurrence. Fashion is always retro, but always on the basis of the abolition of the passé (the past): the spectral death and resurrection of forms. Its proper actuality (its 'up-to-dateness', its 'relevance') is not a reference to the present, but an immediate and total recycling.

Jean Baudrillard
The desert is no longer a landscape, it is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others.

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
It is exciting to hear one of your fondest ideas formulated in one fell swoop, better than you could have done yourself.

Jean Baudrillard
There is no human reason to be here, except for the sheer ecstasy of being crowded together.

Jean Baudrillard
It is in love with its limitless horizontality, as New York may be with its verticality.

Jean Baudrillard
The day the world ends, no one will be there, just as no one was there when it began. This is a scandal. Such a scandal for the human race that it is indeed capable collectively, out of spite, of hastening the end of the world by all means just so it can enjoy the show.

Jean Baudrillard
It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.

Jean Baudrillard