Raoul Vaneigem Quotes

The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.

The millions of human beings who were shot, tortured, starved, treated like animals and made the object of a conspiracy of ridicule, can sleep in peace in their communal graves, for at least the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to believe, on the strength of their daily dose of television, that they are happy and free. The Communards went down, fighting to the last, so that you too could qualify for a Caribbean cruise.

Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?

The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life.

Suffering is the pain of constraints. An atom of pure delight, no matter how small, can hold it at bay.

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power. The old proletariat sold its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time it had was passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology.

We have a world of pleasure to win, and nothing to lose but boredom.

Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume; the hellish cycle is complete.

Daydreaming subverts the world.

Hope is the leash of submission.

The world of the commodity is a world upside-down, which bases itself not upon life but upon the transformation of life into work.

To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.

Work is the opposite of creativity.

I do not dream of a gentle revolution. My passion runs to the violence of supersession, the ferocity of a life that renounces nothing.

People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure, but of the use to which they are.

Privative appropriation and domination are thus originally imposed and felt as a positive right, but in the form of a negative universality. Valid for everyone, justified in everyone's eyes by divine or natural law, the right of privative appropriation is objectified in a general illusion, in a universal transcendence, in an essential law under which everyone individually manages to tolerate the more or less narrow limits assigned to his right to live and to the conditions of life in general.

It is entirely up to us to invent our own lives.

The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.

Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.

The history of our times calls to mind those Walt Disney characters who rush madly over the edge of a cliff without seeing it, so that the power of their imagination keeps them suspended in mid-air; but as soon as they look down and see where they are, they fall.

The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself.

Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.

There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies.