Jean Baudrillard Quotes

“A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.”

“Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”

“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.”

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

“Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.”

“Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.”

“Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.”

“Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved – commitment to a scenario.”

“How many faces, how many bodies can you recognize, with your eyes closed, only by touching them? Have you ever closed your eyes and acted unconsciously? Or loved someone so blindly, you could almost feel their energy in a dark room and be moved by the powerful touch of their ideas?”

“I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again.

When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?”

“If you say 'I love you', then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.”

“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.

How could one not wish for that with all one's heart? How could one not lend one's feeble resources to bringing it about?”

“In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.”

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

“It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.”

“Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish-fulfillment.”

“Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.”

“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.”

“Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.”

“Philosophy leads to death, sociology leads to suicide.”

“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.”

“Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.”

“Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.”

“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.”

“Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.”

“The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.”

“The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.”

“The order of the world is always right – such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin.”

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

“The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction.

The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.”