Jean Baudrillard Quotes

Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.

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.

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.

The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance, but deceit and fraud.

What I am, I don't know. I am the simulacrum of myself.

Art does not die because there is no more art. It dies because there is too much.

All societies end up wearing masks.

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.

Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world. This is as marvelous as being there in the beginning.

Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.

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 simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.

Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.

The only thing worse than being bored is being boring.

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history.

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.

The day the world ends, no one will be there, just as no one was there when it began. This is a scandal. Such a scandal for the human race that it is indeed capable collectively, out of spite, of hastening the end of the world by all means just so it can enjoy the show.

But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.

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.

Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.