Top 170 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Virilio

Science, which is not so attached to 'truth' as it once was, ut more to immediate 'effectiveness', is now drifting towards a decline, it's civic fall from grace.

Images contaminate us like viruses.

War was my university. Everything has proceeded from there.

The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light.

It will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed 'the integral accident' that is the continuation of politics by other means.

In a way, technologies have negated the transcendental God in order to invent the machine-God. However, these two gods raise similar questions.

From the original watchtower through the anchored balloon to the reconnaissance aircraft and remote sensing-satellites, one and the same function has been indefinitely repeated, the eye's function being the function of a weapon.

All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it...The great stroke of luck for the military class's terrorism is that no one recognizes it. People don't recognize the militarized part of their identity, of their consciousness.

In the very near future, and I stress this important point, it will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed 'the integral accident' that is the continuation of politics by other means.

The field of vision is comparable, for me, to the terrain of an archaeological dig. To see is to be on guard, to wait for what emerges from the background, without any name, without any particular interest: what was silent will speak, what is closed will open and will take on a voice.

Today, everything is about speed and real time. We are no longer concerned with real space.

There cannot be an animal body without a territorial body: three bodies are grafted over each other: the territorial body - the planet, the social body - the couple, and the animal body - you and me. And technology splits this unity, leaving us without a sense of where we are. This, too, is de-realization.

Cyberspace is acting like God and deals with the idea of God who is, sees and hears everything.

Art is drama. Any relationship to art is also a relationship to death.

Art is alive because it is mortal.

Troops must be fed with ammunition and so on but also with information, with images, with visual intelligence. Without these elements troops cannot perform their duties properly. This is what is meant by the logistics of perception.

The territorial body has been polluted by roads, elevators, etc. Similarly, our animal body starts being polluted. Ecology no longer deals with water, flora, wildlife and air only. It deals with the body itself as well. It is comparable with an invasion: technology is invading our body because of miniaturisation.

There is a buddhist proverb which I like a lot. It says: "Every body deserves mercy". That means that every body is holy.

The thing about collaborators is that you don't know you are one whereas as a member of the resistance, you do. [In WWII,] the worst cases of collaboration weren't among the real collaborators, that official militia, but among the people at large, who were collaborators without knowing it, by a sort of laxity, an apathy.

The simulator is an object in itself, which is different from televison and leads to cyberspace.

The technologies of virtual reality are attempting to make us see from beneath, from inside, from behind... as if we were God.

The world and man are identical. This is why racism is the most stupid thing in the world.

Art used to be painting, sculpture, music, etc, but now, all technology has become art. Of course, this form of art is still very primitive, but it is slowly replacing reality.

These new technologies try to make virtual reality more powerful than actual reality, which is the true accident. The day when virtual reality becomes more powerful than reality will be the day of the big accident. Mankind never experienced such an extraordinary accident.

What is accidented is reality.

The ideals of technological culture remain underdeveloped and therefore outside of popular culture and the practical ideals of democracy. This is also why society as a whole has no control over technological developments. And this is one of the gravest threats to democracy in the near future. It is, then, imperative to develop a democratic technological culture.

The true problem with virtual reality is that orientation is no longer possible. We have lost our points of reference to orient ourselves. The de-realized man is a disoriented man.

Digital messages and images matter less than their instantaneous delivery; the shock effect always wins out over the consideration of the informational content.

There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We'll dream of being blind.

People make fun of cybersex, but it's really something to take into account: it is a drama, a split of the human being! The human being can now be changed into some kind of spectrum or ghost who has sex at a distance. That is really scary because what used to be the most intimate and the most important relationship to reality is being split. This is no simulation but the coexistence of two separate worlds.

I don't believe in simulationism, I believe that the word is already old-fashioned. As I see it, new technologies are substituting a virtual reality for an actual reality. And this is more than a phase: it's a definite change.

Today, the media handle information as if it was a religious artefact.

One day the virtual world might win over the real world.

Resistance is always possible! But we must engage in resistance first of all by developing the idea of a technological culture.

Television was first conceived to be used as some kind of telescope, not for broadcasting. Originally, Sworkin, the inventor of television, wanted to settle cameras on rockets so that it would be possible to watch the sky.

Wealth is the hidden side of speed and speed the hidden side of wealth.

Video is originally a de-corporation, a disqualification of the sensorial organs which are replaced by machines. The eye and the hand are replaced by the data glove, the body is replaced by a data suit, sex is replaced by cybersex. All the qualities of the body are transferred to the machine.

As I have said many times before, the speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light. And it is nothing else!

There are three bombs. The first one is the atomic bomb, which disintegrates reality, the second one is the digital or computer bomb, which destroys the principle of reality itself - not the actual object - and rebuilds it, and finally the third bomb is the demographic one. Some experts have found out that in five thousand years from now, the weight of the population will be heavier than the weight of the planet. That means that humanity will constitute a planet of its own!

Time is not something that can be measured with a pendule. Time is something that we build together within a tribe, a family, a region.

Many people question their religious identity today, not necessarily by thinking of converting to Judaism or to Islam: it's just that technologies seriously challenge the status of the human being. All technologies converge toward the same spot, they all lead to a Deus ex Machina, a machine-God.

Television exposes the world to the accident. The world is exposed to accidents through television.

... the blinding Hiroshima flash... literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things, so that every surface immediately became war's recording surface, its film.

Virtuality will destroy reality.

To regain our liberty (and our distance), we must slow the images down.

How can we live if there is no more here and everything is now?

The body has a dimension of simulation. The learning process, for instance: when one learns how to drive a car or a van, once in the van, one feels completely lost. But then, once you have learnt how to drive, the whole van is in your body. It is integrated into your body.

War is cinema, and cinema is war

If we consider my latest book, Strategie de la deception, what we need to focus on are the other aspects of the same phenomenon.

We are entering a world where there won't be one but two realities, just like we have two eyes or hear bass and treble tones, just like we now have stereoscopy and stereophony: there will be two realities: the actual, and the virtual. Thus there is no simulation, but substitution. Reality has become symmetrical. The splitting of reality in two parts is a considerable event which goes far beyond simulation.

While the human gaze becomes more and more fixed, losing some of its natural speed and sensitivity, photographic shots, on the contrary, become even faster.

The body is not simply the combination of dance, muscles, body-building, strength and sex: it is a universe.

Cyberspace is an accident of the real. Virtual reality is the accident of reality itself.

Science, which is not so attached to 'truth' as it once was, but more to immediate 'effectiveness', is now drifting towards a decline, it's civic fall from grace.

Thus it is no longer a Caesar or a Napoleon who decides on the fate of any particular war but a piece of software! In short, the political intelligence of war and the political intelligence of society no longer penetrate the techno-scientific world.

When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution...Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.

Speed now illuminates reality whereas light once gave objects of the world their shape.

The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.

As I said back in 1984, the idea of logistics is not only about oil, about ammunitions and supplies but also about images.

I repeat what I suggest in my book [ Strategie de la deception]. The first deterrence, nuclear deterrence, is presently being superseded by the second deterrence: a type of deterrence based on what I call 'the information bomb' associated with the new weaponry of information and communications technologies.