It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Politics, Politicians
The obese is in a total delirium. For he is not only large, of a size opposed to normal morphology: he is larger than large. He no longer makes sense in some distinctive opposition, but in his excess, his redundancy.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Diet
The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one side won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.
—Jean Baudrillard
With the truth, you need to get rid of it as soon as possible and pass it on to someone else. As with illness, this is the only way to be cured of it. The person who keeps truth in his hands has lost.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Truth
Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Information
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
If there is a species which is more maltreated than children, then it must be their toys, which they handle in an incredibly off-hand manner. Toys are thus the end point in that long chain in which all the conditions of despotic high-handedness are in play which enchain beings one to another, from one species to another—cruel divinities to their sacrificial victims, from masters to slaves, from adults to children, and from children to their objects.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Children
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
Topics: Freedom
We are all hostages, and we are all terrorists. This circuit has replaced that other one of masters and slaves, the dominating and the dominated, the exploiters and the exploited. It is worse than the one it replaces, but at least it liberates us from liberal nostalgia and the ruses of history.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Terrorism
Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Discovery
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
The local is a shabby thing. There’s nothing worse than bringing us back down to our own little corner, our own territory, the radiant promiscuity of the face to face. A culture which has taken the risk of the universal, must perish by the universal.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Travel
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
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
If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Love
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
Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved—commitment to a scenario.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Government
Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Paradise
Contact with men who wield power and authority still leaves an intangible sense of repulsion. It’s very like being in close proximity to fecal matter, the fecal embodiment of something unmentionable, and you wonder what it is made of and when it acquired its historically sacred character.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Power
As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their oscillated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Culture, Twentieth Century
Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.
—Jean Baudrillard
Genius is childhood recaptured.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Genius
In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.
—Jean Baudrillard
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
The world is not dialectical—it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.
—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
Topics: Hollywood
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: Pornography, Audiences
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
To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Love
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: Holidays, Christmas
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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