Raoul Vaneigem Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself.

Raoul Vaneigem
Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out.

Raoul Vaneigem
Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete.

Raoul Vaneigem
Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.
Of the 1960s

Raoul Vaneigem
The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.

Raoul Vaneigem
We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.

Raoul Vaneigem
Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.

Raoul Vaneigem
Suffering is the pain of constraints. An atom of pure delight, no matter how small, can hold it at bay.

Raoul Vaneigem
In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the

Raoul Vaneigem
People are bewitched into believing that time slips away, and this belief is the basis of time actually slipping away.

Raoul Vaneigem
Where constraint breaks people, and mediation makes fools of them, the seduction of power is what makes them love their oppression. Because of it, people give up their real riches for a cause that mutilates them; for an appearance that reifies them; for roles that wrest them from authentic life; for a time whose passage defines and confines them.

Raoul Vaneigem
Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?

Raoul Vaneigem
To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.

Raoul Vaneigem
People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.

Raoul Vaneigem
In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption. The dictatorship of consumer goods has finally destroyed the barriers of blood, lineage and race.

Raoul Vaneigem
The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life.

Raoul Vaneigem
People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure, but of the use to which they are.

Raoul Vaneigem
In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.

Raoul Vaneigem
The history of our times calls to mind those Walt Disney characters who rush madly over the edge of a cliff without seeing it, so that the power of their imagination keeps them suspended in mid-air; but as soon as they look down and see where they are, they fall.

Raoul Vaneigem
To work for delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable from preparing for a general insurrection

Raoul Vaneigem
There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies.

Raoul Vaneigem