Quote: Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face. [Jean Baudrillard]
Quote: A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy. [Jean Baudrillard]
Quote: Executives are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an executive away from his business, he goes on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business. He never stops hurtling onwards, making decisions and executing them. [Jean Baudrillard]
Quote: The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night. [Jean Baudrillard]
Quote: The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence. [Jean Baudrillard]
Quote: 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]
Quote: Depression moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur, our mood changes again, since the accident shows we can draw the world in our wake, and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power. [Jean Baudrillard]
Quote: Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust. [Jean Baudrillard]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: Genius is childhood recaptured. [Jean Baudrillard]
Quote: We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself. [Jean Baudrillard]
Quote: There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world. [Jean Baudrillard]
Quote: Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors. [Jean Baudrillard]
Quote: 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]
Quote: What is a society without a heroic dimension? [Jean Baudrillard]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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. [Jean Baudrillard]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are. [Jean Baudrillard]