Why should I know Jean Baudrillard?

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

“Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent.”

“The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.”

“There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.”

“There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.”

“This is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.”

“Travel was once a means of being elsewhere, or of being nowhere. Today it is the only way we have of feeling that we are somewhere. At home, surrounded by information, by screens, I am no longer anywhere, but rather everywhere in the world at once, in the midst of a universal banality - a banality that is the same in every country. To arrive in a new city, or in a new language, is suddenly to find oneself here and nowhere else. The body rediscovers how to look. Delivered from images, it rediscovers the imagination.”

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