There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each. This is not just a stock of affects or pleasure, but also the possibility of playing double or quits with the share you hold in the other’s heart.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Lovers, Love
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: Theory, Assumptions
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: Death, Life, Living
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 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
Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary. He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Terrorism
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
Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Television
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
Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Language
It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Politicians, Politics
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
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
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: Civilization
Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: America
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
Topics: Politics
It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Identity
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: Foolishness, Fools
Genius is childhood recaptured.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Genius
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
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 becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.
—Jean Baudrillard
Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Statistics
Terror is as much a part of the concept of truth as runniness is of the concept of jam. We wouldn’t like jam if it didn’t, by its very nature, ooze. We wouldn’t like truth if it wasn’t sticky, if, from time to time, it didn’t ooze blood.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Fear
If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams then you must still regard America today with the same naive enthusiasm as the generations that discovered the New World.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Discovery
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: Fiction, Authors & Writing
There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Innocence
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: America, Culture
Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Feelings, Affectation
At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Sex
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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