Genius is childhood recaptured.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Genius
In days gone by, we were afraid of dying in dishonor or a state of sin. Nowadays, we are afraid of dying fools. Now the fact is that there is no Extreme Unction to absolve us of foolishness. We endure it here on earth as subjective eternity.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Fools, Foolishness
The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Change
You are born modern, you do not become so.
—Jean Baudrillard
A woman spent all Christmas Day in a telephone box without ringing anyone. If someone comes to phone, she leaves the box, then resumes her place afterwards. No one calls her either, but from a window in the street, someone watched her all day, no doubt since they had nothing better to do. The Christmas syndrome.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Christmas, Holidays
There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Television
Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction
It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Politicians, Politics
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
Topics: Computers
We are no longer in a state of growth; we are in a state of excess. We are living in a society of excrescence. The boil is growing out of control, recklessly at cross purposes with itself, its impacts multiplying as the causes disintegrate.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Excess
At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Sex
Sadder than destitution, sadder than a beggar is the man who eats alone in public. Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honor of sharing or disputing each other’s food.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Food
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
Topics: Men & Women, Men, Women
Here in the U.S., culture is not that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space and which has its own special columns in the newspapers—and in people’s minds. Culture is space, speed, cinema, technology. This culture is authentic, if anything can be said to be authentic.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Culture, America
Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Statistics
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
Topics: Living, Life, Death
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
Topics: Order
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
Topics: America
If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don’t speak, it’s because everything’s perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Language
Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.
—Jean Baudrillard
Man has lost the basic skill of the ape, the ability to scratch its back. Which gave it extraordinary independence, and the liberty to associate for reasons other than the need for mutual back-scratching.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Evolution
Pornography is the quadraphonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules. Science has already habituated us to this microscopics, this excess of the real in its microscopic detail, this voyeurism of exactitude.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Pornography
We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Greatness, Greatness & Great Things
It is not enough for theory to describe and analyze, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Assumptions, Theory
At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Audiences, Pornography
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
Topics: Mistakes
Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Prophecy
A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Criticism, Critics
The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction… The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is the hyperreal
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Reality
Politicians—power itself—are abject because they merely embody the profound contempt people have for their own lives. One should be grateful to the politicians for accepting the abstractness of power, and ridding others of its burden. This inevitably kills them but they get their revenge by passing onto others the corpse of power.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Politics
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Jacques Derrida French Philosopher, Literary Theorist
- Simone de Beauvoir French Philosopher
- Roland Barthes French Literary Theorist
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Jean-Paul Sartre French Philosopher
- Michel Foucault French Philosopher
- Claude Levi-Strauss French Anthropologist
- Umberto Eco Italian Novelist
- Henri Poincare French Mathematician
- Gaston Bachelard French Philosopher
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