Top 100 Jean Baudrillard Quotes
#1. Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened.
Jean Baudrillard
#2. When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.
Jean Baudrillard
#3. I vote, I participate, I am present, I am concerned - mirror of a paradoxical mockery, mirror of the indifference of all public signification.
Jean Baudrillard
#4. The Yuppies are not defectors from revolt, they are a new race, assured, amnestied, exculpated, moving with ease in the world of performance, mentally indifferent to any objective other than that of change and advertising.
Jean Baudrillard
#5. Forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself.
Jean Baudrillard
#6. The day the world ends, no one will be there, just as no one was there when it began. This is a scandal. Such a scandal for the human race that it is indeed capable collectively, out of spite, of hastening the end of the world by all means just so it can enjoy the show.
Jean Baudrillard
#7. Hell of simulation, which is no longer one of torture, but of subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning ...
Jean Baudrillard
#8. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences.
Jean Baudrillard
#9. The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one side won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.
Jean Baudrillard
#10. It is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality.
Jean Baudrillard
#11. This is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.
Jean Baudrillard
#12. We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.
Jean Baudrillard
#14. 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.
Jean Baudrillard
#15. Sadder than destitution, sadder than a beggar is the man who eats alone in public. Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honor of sharing or disputing each other's food.
Jean Baudrillard
#16. One of the pleasures of travel is to dive into places where others are compelled to live and come out unscathed, full of the malicious pleasure of abandoning them to their fate.
Jean Baudrillard
#18. The obese is in a total delirium. For he is not only large, of a size opposed to normal morphology: he is larger than large. He no longer makes sense in some distinctive opposition, but in his excess, his redundancy.
Jean Baudrillard
#19. Take your desires for reality! can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power.
Jean Baudrillard
#21. It is perhaps not a surprise that photography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality started to disappear. It is even perhaps the disappearance of reality that triggered this technical form. Reality found a way to mutate into an image.
Jean Baudrillard
#22. All of [the] activities here have a surreptitious end-of-the-world feel to them: ... these joggers sleepwalking in the mist like shadow's who have escaped from Plato's cave
Jean Baudrillard
#23. It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable.
Jean Baudrillard
#24. So-called 'realist' photography does not capture the 'what is.' Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.
Jean Baudrillard
#26. 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.
Jean Baudrillard
#27. Twins were deified, and sacrificed, in a more savage culture: hypersimilitude was equivalent to the murder of the original, and thus to a pure non-meaning.
Jean Baudrillard
#29. A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.
Jean Baudrillard
#30. In its artless cruelty, Dallas is superior to any "intelligent" critique that can be made of it. That is why intellectual snobberymeets its match here.
Jean Baudrillard
#31. A successful object is one which exists beyond its own reality, which creates a dual (and not merely interactlve) relation (with its users also), a relation of contradiction, misappropriation and destablilisation.
Jean Baudrillard
#32. There are only a few images that are not forced to provide meaning, or have to go through the filter of a specific idea.
Jean Baudrillard
#33. The image is not a medium for which we have to find the proper use. It is what it is and it is beyond all our moral considerations. It is by its essence immoral, and the world's becoming-image is an immoral process.
Jean Baudrillard
#34. To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending
Jean Baudrillard
#35. Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.
Jean Baudrillard
#36. The surprises of thought are like those of love: they wear out. But here too you can carry on for a long time doing your conjugal duty.
Jean Baudrillard
#37. 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?
Jean Baudrillard
#38. Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.
Jean Baudrillard
#39. 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.
Jean Baudrillard
#40. In our culture, futility plays the role of transgression and fashion is condemned for having within it the force of the pure sign which signifies nothing.
Jean Baudrillard
#41. There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. Appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism. This is where seduction begins.
Jean Baudrillard
#42. If you do not lend your car, your fountain pen or your wife to anyone, that is because these objects, according to the logic of jealously, are narcissistic equivalents of the ego: to lose them, or for them to be damaged, means castration.
Jean Baudrillard
#43. 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.
Jean Baudrillard
#44. The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.
Jean Baudrillard
#45. History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history.
Jean Baudrillard
#46. Protect everything, detect everything, contain everything - obsessional society. Save time. Save money. Save our souls - phobic society. Low tar. Low energy. Low calories. Low sex. Low speed - anorexic society.
Jean Baudrillard
#47. Simultaneously, in the most complete ambiguity, they [media] propagate the brutal charm of the terrorist act, they are themselves terrorists, insofar as they themselves march to the tune of seduction.
Jean Baudrillard
#48. Each segment of the worm is directly reproduced as a whole worm, just as each cell of the American CEO can produce a new CEO.
Jean Baudrillard
#49. 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.
Jean Baudrillard
#50. It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.
Jean Baudrillard
#51. In order for ethnology to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge for being 'discovered' and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it.
Jean Baudrillard
#52. Power is only too happy to make football bear a diabolical responsibility for stupifying the masses
Jean Baudrillard
#53. Every woman is like a time-zone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night.
Jean Baudrillard
#54. Sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public.
Jean Baudrillard
#55. Our sentimentality toward animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we hold them. Sentimentality is nothing but the infinitely degraded form of bestiality, the racist commiseration.
Jean Baudrillard
#56. The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.
Jean Baudrillard
#57. Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.
Jean Baudrillard
#58. Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.
Jean Baudrillard
#59. Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.
Jean Baudrillard
#60. A thing which has lost its idea is like the man who has lost his shadow, and it must either fall under the sway of madness or perish.
Jean Baudrillard
#61. There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.
Jean Baudrillard
#62. Pornography is the quadraphonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules. Science has already habituated us to this microscopics, this excess of the real in its microscopic detail, this voyeurism of exactitude.
Jean Baudrillard
#63. 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.
Jean Baudrillard
#64. The real joy of writing lies in the opportunity of being able to sacrifice a whole chapter for a single sentence, a complete sentence for a single word...
Jean Baudrillard
#65. So, there is no longer striking, nor work, but both simultaneously, that is to say something else: a magic of work, a trompel'oeil, a scenodrama (so as not to say a melodrama) of production, a collective dramaturgy on the empty stage of the social.
Jean Baudrillard
#66. Man has become less rational than his own objects, which now run ahead of him, so to speak, organizing his surroundings and thus appropriating his actions.
Jean Baudrillard
#68. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire but our own: The desert of the real itself.
Jean Baudrillard
#69. Just as the waste of time nourishes the hell of leisure, so technological wastes nourish the hell of war. Wastes which incarnate the secret violence of this society, uncoerced and non-degradable defecation.
Jean Baudrillard
#70. If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams then you must still regard America today with the same naive enthusiasm as the generations that discovered the New World.
Jean Baudrillard
#71. It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.
Jean Baudrillard
#72. With the truth, you need to get rid of it as soon as possible and pass it on to someone else. As with illness, this is the only way to be cured of it. The person who keeps truth in his hands has lost ...
Jean Baudrillard
#73. Business owners are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an owner away from his business, he goes on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business. He never stops hurtling onwards, making decisions and executing them.
Jean Baudrillard
#74. The neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone- remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygenic design- but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness.
Jean Baudrillard
#75. The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost it's meaning
Jean Baudrillard
#76. Speed is simply the rite that initiates us into
emptiness: a nostalgic desire for forms to revert to immobility, concealed beneath the very intensification of their mobility. Akin to the nostalgia for living forms that haunts geometry.
Jean Baudrillard
#77. Contact with men who wield power and authority still leaves an intangible sense of repulsion. It's very like being in close proximity to fecal matter, the fecal embodiment of something unmentionable, and you wonder what it is made of and when it acquired its historically sacred character.
Jean Baudrillard
#79. Information ... exhausts itself in the staging of meaning ... [and leads] not at all to a surfeit of innovation but to the very contrary, to total entropy
Jean Baudrillard
#80. The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance, but deceit and fraud.
Jean Baudrillard
#81. Desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.
Jean Baudrillard
#82. For the heavenly fire no longer strikes depraved cities, it is rather the lens which cuts through ordinary reality like a laser, putting it to death.
Jean Baudrillard
#83. Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.
Jean Baudrillard
#84. Terrorism, like viruses, is everywhere. There is a global perfusion of terrorism, which accompanies any system of domination as though it were its shadow, ready to activate itself anywhere, like a double agent.
Jean Baudrillard
#85. If everything on television is, without exception, part of a low-calorie (or even no-calorie) diet, then what good is it complaining about the adverts? By their worthlessness, they at least help to make the programmes around them seem of a higher level.
Jean Baudrillard
#86. We are fascinated by Ramses as Renaissance Christians were by the American Indians, those (human?) beings who had never known the word of Christ.
Jean Baudrillard
#87. 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.
Jean Baudrillard
#88. The presence is not deleted before the vacuum is cleared before a redoubling of presence that erases the opposition of the presence and absence
Jean Baudrillard
#89. For me, the photography, in its purest form, is a variant of the fable. Another way of saving the appearances - a way of signifying, through this fabulous capture, that this supposed real world is always about to lose its meaning and its reality ...
Jean Baudrillard
#90. The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject the real and the referential everywhere, to persuade us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production.
Jean Baudrillard
#91. In days gone by, we were afraid of dying in dishonor or a state of sin. Nowadays, we are afraid of dying fools. Now the fact is that there is no Extreme Unction to absolve us of foolishness. We endure it here on earth as subjective eternity.
Jean Baudrillard
#92. The whole world thus becomes integrated as a spectacle into the domestic universe.
Jean Baudrillard
#93. 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.
Jean Baudrillard
#94. 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?
Jean Baudrillard
#95. I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.
Jean Baudrillard
#96. Mistakes, scandals, and failures no longer signal catastrophe. The crucial thing is that they be made credible, and that the public be made aware of the efforts being expended in that direction. The marketing immunity of governments is similar to that of the major brands of washing powder.
Jean Baudrillard
#97. Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.
Jean Baudrillard
#98. Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stock-exchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared.
Jean Baudrillard
#99. Art is no longer anything more than a kind of meta-language for banality.
Jean Baudrillard
#100. Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory. Men have only had an unconscious since they lost a territory.
Jean Baudrillard
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