Jean Baudrillard Quotes

“Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays cosily tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.”

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

“Human rights, dissidence, antiracism, SOS-this, SOS-that: these are soft, easy, post coitum historicum ideologies, 'after-the-orgy' ideologies for an easy-going generation which has known neither hard ideologies nor radical philosophies.

The ideology of a generation which is neo-sentimental in its politics too, which has rediscovered altruism, conviviality, international charity and the individual bleeding heart. Emotional outpourings, solidarity, cosmopolitan emotiveness, multi-media pathos: all soft values harshly condemned by the Nietzschean, Marxo-Freudian age...

A new generation, that of the spoilt children of the crisis, whereas the preceding one was that of the accursed children of history.”

“Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.”

“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.

Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters — there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void.

We are back in the Byzantine situation, where idolatry calls on a plethora of images to conceal from itself the fact that God no longer exists.

That's why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of a presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.”