Top 100 Slavoj Zizek Quotes

#1. I think boredom is the beginning of every authentic act. ( ... ) Boredom opens up the space, for new engagements. Without boredom, no creativity. If you are not bored, you just stupidly enjoy the situation in which you are.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #7787
#2. A truly radical change is self-relating: it changes the very coordinates by means of which we measure change. In other words, a true change sets its own standards: it can only be measured by criteria that result from it.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #41571
#3. 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?

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #77257
#4. 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.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #103319
#5. In Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #113178
#6. In short, the ultimate source of Evil is compasion itself

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #114012
#7. Like love, ideology is blind, even if people caught up in it are not

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #136768
#8. The minimum necessary structuring ingredient of every ideology is to distance itself from another ideology, to denounce its other as ideology.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #146615
#9. IDEOLOGY IS A CERTAIN UNIQUE EXPERIENCE OF THE UNIVERSE AND YOUR PLACE IN IT, TO PUT IT IN STANDARD TERMS, WHICH SERVES THE PRODUCTION OF THE EXISTING POWER RELATIONS AND BLAH BLAH BLAH.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #190788
#10. For Lacan, language is a gift as dangerous to humanity as the horse was to the Trojans: it offers itself to our use free of charge, but once we accept it, it colonizes us.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #194262
#11. An entity is free when it can deploy its immanent potential without being impeded by any external obstacle.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #200415
#12. the 'magic cave' enables us to joyously accept the End. There is nothing morbid in it; such an acceptance is, on the contrary, the necessary background of concrete social engagement.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #249971
#13. Ultimately,we hear things because we cannot see everything.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #281132
#14. The Christian motto 'All men are brothers', however, also means that those who do not accept brotherhood are not men.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #289900
#15. ... I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #296635
#16. A typical guy who buys organic food doesn't really buy it in order to be healthy; he buys it to regain a kind of solidarity as the one who really cares about nature. He buys a certain ideological stance.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #330427
#17. Those who were still able to write beautiful melodies were kitsch composers like Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky approaches true art not in his numerous beautiful melodies, but when a melodic line is thwarted.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #344368
#18. Nowadays, you can do anything that you want - anal, oral, fisting - but you need to be wearing gloves, condoms, protection.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #345381
#19. The true ethical test is not only the readiness to save the victims, but also - even more, perhaps - the ruthless dedication to annihilating those who made them victims.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #348256
#20. Does everything that exists have to be grounded in sufficient reasons? Or are there things that somehow happen out of nowhere?

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #350360
#21. You can be a fanatical millennialist religious mystic, and you are, in a certain way, not outside of ideology. Your position can be that of perfectly describing the data and nonetheless your point is ideological.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #369535
#22. We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #404695
#23. Symptoms are never just secondary failures or distortions of the basically sound System - they are indicators that there is something "rotten" (antagonistic, inconsistent) in the very heart of the System.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #418303
#24. Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #461232
#25. Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #472149
#26. I despise the kind of book which tells you how to live, how to make yourself happy! Philosophers have no good news for you at this level! I believe the first duty of philosophy is making you understand what deep shit you are in!

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #485828
#27. It is the reign of contemporary global capitalism which is the true Lord of Misrule.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #490754
#28. A spectre is haunting Western academia ( ... ), the spectre of the Cartesian subject.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #494048
#29. When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #502624
#30. You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #525046
#31. I may still be a kind of a Marxist but I'm very realistic, I don't have these dreams of revolutionists around the corner.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #565547
#32. The same rightists who decades ago were shouting, 'Better dead than red!' are now often heard mumbling, 'Better red than eating hamburgers.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #579831
#33. The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #611438
#34. Postcolonialism is the invention of rich Indian guys who wanted to make a good career in the west by playing on the guilt of white liberals

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #614344
#35. Human Reason cannot be reduced to the result of evolutionary adaptation; art is not just a heightened procedure of providing sensual pleasures, but a medium of Truth;

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #647227
#36. We need useless theory more than ever today.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #655237
#37. the only choice is that between direct or indirect relations of domination and exploitation, with any alternative dismissed as utopian.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #661760
#38. Fascism is relatively easy to explain. It is a reactionary phenomenon. Nazism was some bad guys having some bad ideas and unfortunately succeeding in realizing them.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #671444
#39. There is a wonderful expression in Persian, war nam nihadan, which means to murder somebody, bury his body, then grow flowers over the body to conceal it

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #687314
#40. It's bad if we are controlled, but if we're not, it can be even worse.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #693707
#41. An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #706642
#42. In Stalinism the tragedy is that its origin is some kind of radical emancipatory project. In the origins you had a kind of workers' uprising; the true enigma is how this project of emancipation went so wrong.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #709939
#43. As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #751860
#44. What Americans don't want to admit ... is that not only is there not a contradiction between state regulation and freedom, but in order for us to actually be free in our social interactions, there must be an extremely elaborated network of health, law, institutions, moral rules and so on.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #781045
#45. In this way the world market is, with regard to its immanent dynamic, 'a space in which everyone has once been a productive labourer, and in which labour has everywhere begun to price itself out of the system'.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #783525
#46. I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #818306
#47. 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.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #845152
#48. What is "true" thinking? Thinking is not solving problems. The first step in thinking is to ask these sorts of questions: "Is this really a problem?" "Is this the right way to formulate the problem?" "How did we arrive at this?" This is the ability we need in thinking.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #849561
#49. You can be an extreme materialist, thinking that economic development ultimately determines everything; then you are truly ideological.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #857845
#50. Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #865749
#51. Ideology today is unfreedom which you sincerely personally experience as freedom.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #865930
#52. It's not the same thing: coffee without cream or coffee without milk.
What you don't get is part of the identity of what you get.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #895745
#53. My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #899720
#54. 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.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #906143
#55. Atheism is not the denial of the existence of God, but having doubts as to whether God is conscious.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #928657
#56. It is the ultimate irony of history that radical individualism serves as the ideological justification of the unconstrained power of what the large majority of individuals experience as a vast anonymous power, which, without any democratic public control, regulates their lives.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #933597
#57. So when the ruling ideology enjoins us to enjoy sex, not to feel guilty about it, since we are not bound by any prohibitions whose violations should make us feel guilty, the price we pay for this absence of guilt is anxiety.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #947450
#58. Every civilisation that disavows its barbarian potential has already capitulated to barbarism.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #993725
#59. In other words, who dares to strike today,when having the security of a permanent job is itself becoming a privilege?

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1028828
#60. The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1036226
#61. I couldn't help noticing how all the best Marxist analyses are always analyses of a failure ... Like, why did Paris Commune go wrong? Trotskyites. Why did the October Revolution go wrong? And so on ... OK, we screwed it up, but we can give the best theory why it had to happen.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1041183
#62. Thinking begins when you ask really difficult questions.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1079518
#63. Our biological body itself is a form of hardware that needs re-programming through tantra like a new spiritual software which can release or unblock its potential.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1088970
#64. What if eternity is a sterile, impotent, lifeless domain of pure potentialities, which, in order fully to actualize itself, has to pass through temporal existence?

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1091713
#65. While just looking, we are always hunting among objects, looking for what we desire or fear, endeavoring to recognize some pattern; on the other hand, objects themselves always "stare back," vie for our attention, throw at us their lures and endeavor to entrap us.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1102857
#66. . . . if we only change reality in order to realize our dreams, and do not change these dreams themselves, sooner or later we regress back to the old reality.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1120753
#67. Fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists' conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1140856
#68. I almost stopped teaching entirely. The worst thing for me is contact with students. I like universities without students. And I especially hate American students. They think you owe them something. They come to you ... Office hours!

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1179599
#69. It is more satisfying to sacrifice oneself for the poor victim than to enable the other to overcome their victim status and perhaps become even more succesfull than ourselves

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1191582
#70. One does not wait for the "ripe" objective circumstances to make a revolution, circumstances become "ripe" through the political struggle itself.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1217730
#71. But in a radically atheist universe, you are not only responsible for doing your duty, You are also responsible for deciding what is your duty.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1220895
#72. In the electoral campaign, President Bush named as the most important person in his life Jesus . Now he has a unique chance to prove that he meant it seriously: for him, as for all Americans today, "Love thy neighbor!" means "Love the Muslims!" OR IT MEANS NOTHING AT ALL.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1264432
#73. By what right can we call this a system of "corrections"? Is it not, rather, the rubric for a slavishly obedient, oppressed, and humiliated existence?

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1301891
#74. Global capitalism is simply accepted as a fact that you cannot do anything about. The only question is, Will you accommodate yourself to it, or will you be dismissed and excluded?

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1351186
#75. What if the way we perceive a problem is already part of the problem?

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1356308
#76. €7,500, first-class, everything - and all that for 40 minutes selling them some old stuff.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1370669
#77. What characterizes a really great thinker is that they misrecognize the basic dimension of their own breakthrough.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1374833
#78. The ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1381044
#79. I - and I still consider myself, I'm sorry to tell you, a Marxist and a Communist, but I couldn't help noticing how all the best Marxist analyses are always analyses of a failure.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1388710
#80. We Slovenians are even better misers than you Scottish. You know how Scotland began? One of us Slovenians was spending too much money, so we put him on a boat and he landed in Scotland.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1397775
#81. The duty of a politician for me is to be a representative: a politician is not an expert, experts are experts, hired for their expertise.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1411070
#82. Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1414833
#83. In order effectively to liberate oneself from the grip of existing social reality, one should first renounce the transgressive fantasmatic supplement that attaches us to it.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1450596
#84. Strange Christianity, whose most pressing anxiety seems to be that God's grace might prove to be all too free on this side, that hell, instead of being populated with so many people, might some day prove to be empty!

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1478288
#85. In contrast to the situation in 1945, the world does not need the US; it is the US that needs the rest of the world

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1485879
#86. True universalists are not those who preach global tolerance of differences and all-encompassing unity, but those who engage in a passionate struggle for the assertion of the Truth which compels them.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1486415
#87. If Stalin gives you a love advice, it has to succeed.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1515393
#88. as in Heinrich Heine's (a contemporary of Kierkegaard's) well-known saying that one should value above everything else 'freedom, equality and crab soup'. 'Crab soup' stands here for all the small pleasures in the absence of which we become (mental, if not real) terrorists,

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1580364
#89. Q- What makes you depressed?
Seeing stupid people happy.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1585907
#90. The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1591157
#91. True power does not need arrogance, a long beard and a barking voice. True power strangles you with silk ribbons, charm, and intelligence

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1689180
#92. When authority is backed up by an immediate physical compulsion, what we are dealing with is not authority proper (i.e. symbolic authority), but simply an agency of brute force.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1692436
#93. Undoubtedly [Beethoven's] music often verges on kitsch

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1694564
#94. The problem for me is not that Schwarzenegger is governor, but the extent to which even politicians who are not actors are functioning like actors.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1722089
#95. 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.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1763699
#96. Do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not, "Main Street, not Wall Street," but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1771993
#97. See you either in hell or in communism

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1821454
#98. 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.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1838184
#99. Populism is ultimately sustained by the frustrated exasperation of ordinary people, by the cry I don't know what's going on, but I've just had enough of it! It cannot go on! It must stop!

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1866818
#100. For the multiculturalist, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are prohibited, Italians and Irish get a little respect, blacks are good, native Americans are even better. The further away we go, the more they deserve respect. This is a kind of inverted, patronising respect that puts everyone at a distance.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes #1867360

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