Jean Baudrillard Quotes - Page 7

Power floats like money, like language, like theory.

We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.

Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.

A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.

If you assume any rate of improvement at all then the games will become indistinguishable from reality. It would seem to follow that the odds that we are in base reality would be one in billions.

The repentant, run-to-seed ultra-Leftists who have converted to humanitarianism, artificial inseminators of the widow and the orphan, themselves orphans of reality and malades imaginaires of politics, premature ejaculators of posthistory and hyperchondriacs of the dead body of ideology and morality.

Sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public.

Terrorism, like viruses, is everywhere. There is a global perfusion of terrorism, which accompanies any system of domination as though it were its shadow, ready to activate itself anywhere, like a double agent.

Smile and others will smile back.

Kitschis one of the major categories of the modern object. Knick-knacks, rustic odds-and-ends, souvenirs, lampshades, and African masks: the kitsch-object is collectively this whole plethora of "trashy," sham or faked objects, this whole museum of junk which proliferates everywhere.... Kitsch is the equivalent to the "cliché" in discourse.

Y a-t-il plus belle parodie de l'éthique de la valeur que de se soumettre avec toute l'intransigeance de la vertu aux données du hasard ou à l'absurdité d'une règle?

In years to come cities will stretch out horizontally and will be non-urban (Los Angeles). After that, they will bury themselves in the ground and will no longer have names. Everything will become infrastructure bathed in artificial light and energy. The brilliant superstructure, the crazy verticality will have disappeared. New York is the final fling of this baroque verticality, this centrifugal excentricity, before the horizontal dismantling arrives, and the subterranean implosion that will follow.

The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.

The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one side won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.

Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.

It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us unintelligibly, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.

The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.

With the truth, you need to get rid of it as soon as possible and pass it on to someone else. As with illness, this is the only way to be cured of it. The person who keeps truth in his hands has lost.

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.

The desert is no longer a landscape, it is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others.

It is in love with its limitless horizontality, as New York may be with its verticality.

If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams then you must still regard America today with the same naive enthusiasm as the generations that discovered the New World.

It is exciting to hear one of your fondest ideas formulated in one fell swoop, better than you could have done yourself.

In its artless cruelty, Dallas is superior to any "intelligent" critique that can be made of it. That is why intellectual snobberymeets its match here.

Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stock-exchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared.