Slavoj Žižek Quotes

If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.

What if the way we perceive a problem is already part of the problem?

We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.

Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.

Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.

Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.

Thinking begins when you ask really difficult questions.

Often, the worst way to become prisoner of a system is to have a dream that things may turn better, there is always the possibility of change. Because it is precisely this secret dream that keeps you enslaved to the system.

Love is what makes sex more than masturbation. If there is no love even if you are really with a partner you masturbate with a partner.

Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.

The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.

I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.

Atheism is not the denial of the existence of God, but having doubts as to whether God is conscious.

A German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist «chaos» of the painting, asked Picasso: «Did you do this?» Picasso calmly replied: «No, you did this!»

Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.

The horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things -- they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.

Why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than as problems of inequality, exploitation, or injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, rather than emancipation, political struggle, or even armed struggle?

I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.

When we are shown scenes of starving children in Africa, with a call for us to do something to help them, the underlying ideological message is something like: "Don't think, don't politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think!

What if culture itself is nothing but a halt, a break, a respite, in the pursuit of barbarity?

Postcolonialism is the invention of some rich guys from India who saw that they could make a good career in top Western universities by playing on the guilt of white liberals.

I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it.

The ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.

It's bad if we are controlled, but if we're not, it can be even worse.