Guy Debord Quotes

In our society now, we prefer to see ourselves living than living.

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.

... just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.

Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.

Revolution is not 'showing' life to people, but making them live. A revolutionary organization must always remember that its objective is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation.

All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.

In a world that has REALLY been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.

Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.

Behind the masks of total choice, different forms of the same alienation confront each other.

The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.

Work is only justified by leisure time. To admit the emptiness of leisure time is to admit the impossibility of life.

Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.

Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it

Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of images-of-the-world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such the autonomous movement of non-life.

people who personify the system are indeed well known for not being what they seem to be; they have achieved greatness by embracing a level of reality lower than that of the most insignificant individual life- and everyone knows it.

The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.

What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic. And what is genuine is reconstructed as quickly as possible, to resemble the false.

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on this one point, however, because this officially nonexistent bureaucracy simultaneously attributes the crowning achievements of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its existence is everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy must be invisible as a class. As a result, all social life becomes insane.

As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specialisations that they actually live.