Top 181 Quotes & Sayings by Jean Baudrillard
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French sociologist Jean Baudrillard.
Last updated on December 3, 2024.
You are born modern, you do not become so.
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.
Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.
Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
The very definition of the real becomes: 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. The hyper real.
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.
The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.
It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.
Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.
There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.
Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.
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.
It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.
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.
We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.
A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.
Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.
There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.
The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.
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.
What is a society without a heroic dimension?
Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.
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.
I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.
Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We are no longer dealing with historical events, but with places of collapse.
Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile.
... the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials - worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, a more ductile material than meaning... It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself.
Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.
When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.
A successful object is one which exists beyond its own reality, which creates a dual (and not merely interactlve) relation (with its users also), a relation of contradiction, misappropriation and destablilisation.
[I]nside every computer, there is a hidden man being bored.
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.
Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.
Art does not die because there is no more art. It dies because there is too much.
History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history.
Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.
Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.
One of life's primal situations; the game of hide and seek. Oh, the delicious thrill of hiding while the others come looking for you, the delicious terror of being discovered, but what panic when, after a long search, the others abandon you! You mustn't hide too well. You mustn't be too good at the game. The player must never be bigger than the game itself.
For me, the photography, in its purest form, is a variant of the fable. Another way of saving the appearances - a way of signifying, through this fabulous capture, that this supposed real world is always about to lose its meaning and its reality.
Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened.
The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning.
Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true .
What I am, I don't know. I am the simulacrum of myself.
The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance, but deceit and fraud.
All societies end up wearing masks.
The only thing worse than being bored is being boring.
The liberated man is not the one who is freed in his ideal reality, his inner truth, or his transparency; he is the man who changes spaces, who circulates, who changes sex, clothes, and habits according to fashion, rather than morality, and who changes opinions not as his conscience dictates but in response to opinion polls.
We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.
Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.
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