Top 100 Baudrillard Quotes
#1. 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
#2. There is no human reason to be here, except for the sheer ecstasy of being crowded together.
Jean Baudrillard
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.
Jean Baudrillard
#8. The confrontation between America and Europe reveals not so much a rapprochement as a distortion, an unbridgeable rift. There isn't just a gap between us, but a whole chasm of modernity.
Jean Baudrillard
#9. 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
#10. If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.
Jean Baudrillard
#11. What do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen. We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without consequences).
Jean Baudrillard
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don't even arise.
Jean Baudrillard
#16. 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
#17. The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth
it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.
Jean Baudrillard
#18. Even the Middle Ages, which condemned and punished animals in due form, was in this way much closer to them than we are. They held them to be guilty: which was a way of honoring them. We take them for nothing, and it is on this basis that we are "human" with them.
Jean Baudrillard
#19. Pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary.
Jean Baudrillard
#20. 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
#22. Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary. He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.
Jean Baudrillard
#23. 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
#25. A society which allows an abominable event to burgeon from its dung heap and grow on its surface is like a man who lets a fly crawl unheeded across his face or saliva dribble from his mouth
either epileptic or dead.
Jean Baudrillard
#26. 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
#27. The sickly cultural pathos which the whole of France indulges in, that fetishism of the cultural heritage.
Jean Baudrillard
#28. Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.
Jean Baudrillard
#29. Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.
Jean Baudrillard
#30. Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.
Jean Baudrillard
#31. The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.
Jean Baudrillard
#32. 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
#33. It is exciting to hear one of your fondest ideas formulated in one fell swoop, better than you could have done yourself.
Jean Baudrillard
#34. The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence.
Jean Baudrillard
#35. Sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public.
Jean Baudrillard
#36. Man has lost the basic skill of the ape, the ability to scratch its back. Which gave it extraordinary independence, and the liberty to associate for reasons other than the need for mutual back-scratching.
Jean Baudrillard
#37. 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
#38. Power is only too happy to make football bear a diabolical responsibility for stupifying the masses
Jean Baudrillard
#39. 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
#40. Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.
Jean Baudrillard
#41. It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.
Jean Baudrillard
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. We are no longer in a state of growth; we are in a state of excess. We are living in a society of excrescence. The boil is growing out of control, recklessly at cross purposes with itself, its impacts multiplying as the causes disintegrate.
Jean Baudrillard
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history.
Jean Baudrillard
#49. The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.
Jean Baudrillard
#50. 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
#51. Forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself.
Jean Baudrillard
#52. Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.
Jean Baudrillard
#53. It is in love with its limitless horizontality, as New York may be with its verticality.
Jean Baudrillard
#54. 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.
Jean Baudrillard
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Challenge, and not desire, lies at the heart of seduction.
Jean Baudrillard
#59. Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.
Jean Baudrillard
#60. The hyperreal is the abolition of the real not by violent destruction, but by its assumption, elevation to the strength of the model. Anticipation, deterrence, preventive transfiguration, etc.: the model acts as a sphere of absorption of the real.
Jean Baudrillard
#61. You think you photograph a particular scene for the pleasure it gives. In fact it's the scene that wants to be photographed. You're merely an extra in the production.
Jean Baudrillard
#62. Hell of simulation, which is no longer one of torture, but of subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning ...
Jean Baudrillard
#63. 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
#64. This is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.
Jean Baudrillard
#65. Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.
Jean Baudrillard
#66. 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
#67. Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
Jean Baudrillard
#69. Art does not die because there is no more art. It dies because there is too much.
Jean Baudrillard
#70. 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
#71. What one exorcises in this [imagery] way at little cost, and for the price of a few tears, will never in effect be reproduced
Jean Baudrillard
#72. To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.
Jean Baudrillard
#73. The world is not dialectical - it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.
Jean Baudrillard
#75. When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.
Jean Baudrillard
#77. A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.
Jean Baudrillard
#78. The parallel between these animals sick from surplus value and humans sick from industrial concentration is illuminating. ( ... ) Against the industrial organization of death, animals have no other recourse, no other possible defiance, except suicide.
Jean Baudrillard
#81. 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
#82. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.
Jean Baudrillard
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened.
Jean Baudrillard
#90. Take your desires for reality! can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power.
Jean Baudrillard
#91. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#96. What is man if the signs that predate him have such power? A human race has to invent sacrifices equal to the natural cataclysmic order that surrounds it.
Jean Baudrillard
#97. 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
#99. America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.
Jean Baudrillard
#100. 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
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