Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

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For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models.

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

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

Jean Baudrillard
Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is a generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.

Jean Baudrillard
To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: "Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littré). Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary."

Jean Baudrillard
Watergate was thus nothing but a lure held out by the system to catch its adversaries - a simulation of scandal for regenerative ends.

Jean Baudrillard
This is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.

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

Jean Baudrillard
... we are in a logic of simulation, which no longer has anything to do with a logic of facts and an order of reason. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all the models based on the merest fact - the models come first, their circulation, orbital like that of the bomb, constitutes the genuine magnetic field of the event. The facts no longer have a specific trajectory, they are born at the intersection of models, a single fact can be engendered by all the models at once.

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

Jean Baudrillard
If he is this good at acting crazy, it's because he is. Nor is military psychology mistaken in this regard: in this sense, all crazy people simulate, and this lack of distinction is the worst kind of subversion. It is against this lack of distinction that classical reason armed itself in all its categories. But it is what today again outflanks them, submerging the principle of truth.

Jean Baudrillard
It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours: the desert of the real itself.

Jean Baudrillard
Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view.

Jean Baudrillard
When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.

Jean Baudrillard
People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotherapy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc. Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or lost bodies, or lost sociality, or the lost taste for food.

Jean Baudrillard
The simulacrum is never what hides the truth — it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true. — Ecclesiastes

Jean Baudrillard
But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.

Jean Baudrillard