Top 37 Francois Lyotard Quotes
#1. Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.
#2. Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.
#3. ... is postmodernity the pastime of an old man who scrounges in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers, who brandishes unconsciousnesses, lapses, limits, confines, goulags, parataxes, non-senses, or paradoxes, and who turns this into the glory of his novelty, into his promise of change?
#4. It is not the criminals who arouse the hatred of others, but the men who are honest.
#5. What is required of a working hypothesis is a fine capacity for discrimination.
#6. ... We are in a system that doesn't give a rap about sacredness.
#7. A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.
#8. The ruling class is and will continue to be the class of decision makers.
#9. Some encounter me in person, know I am a writer, and don't trust the value of my words. Some encounter my books, know me later, and don't trust the value of my friendship. Both doubt themselves.
#10. Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access to the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the right decisions are made.
#11. ... In the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power.
#12. Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of.
#13. What is new in all of this is that the old poles of attraction represented by nation-states, parties, professions, institutions, and historical traditions are losing their attraction.
#14. It's a huge gap in security, it's a huge problem we've had with our immigration system for many years.
#15. ... Desire baffles knowledge and power.
#16. Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse.
#17. If we wish to discuss knowledge in the most highly developed contemporary society, we must answer the preliminary question of what methodological representation to apply to that society.
#18. I don't think anyone has done a [tablet] product that I see customers wanting.
#19. It is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented.
#20. A grapefruit is just a lemon that saw an opportunity and took advantage of it.
#21. One can decide that the principal role of knowledge is as an indispensable element in the functioning of society, and act in accordance with that decision, only if one has already decided that society is a giant machine.
#22. And today more than ever, knowing about that society involves first of all choosing what approach the inquiry will take, and that necessarily means choosing how society can answer.
#23. If you believe in god, it's much more fantastic to believe that he created this universe billions of years ago and set in motion this long train of activities that eventually resulted in us. I think that's so much more satisfying, more thrilling, than the idea that it was all done in seven days.
#24. Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.
#25. A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before.
#26. I shall call modern that art which ... presents the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible.
#27. One knows that frontal and/or profile photography is torn to pieces ... Inversely, what remains of the photograph must be seen as a fragment coming to fill a gap in the drawing.
#28. On the other hand, in a society whose communication component is becoming more prominent day by day, both as a reality and as an issue, it is clear that language assumes a new importance.
#29. We really think health savings accounts were kind of invented in Indiana.
#30. If you only value my advice when I agree with you, you don't value it at all.
#31. The fool will teach ere he has learned, and his very servants scorn him.
#32. What guides Marxism, then, is a different model of society, and a different conception of the function of the knowledge that can be produced by society and acquired from it.
#33. Liberalism does not preclude an organisation of the flow of money in which some channels are used in decision making while others are only good for the payment of debts.
#34. Solitude, the sly enemy that doth separate a man from well-doing.
#35. Tonight the Internet seemed filled with versions of me, like a fun house filled with mirrors. Some of them made me look prettier, and some of them made me look uglier, and some of them chopped me right in half, but none of them were right.
#36. Instantly I regretted my decision. It was one of those times when you hear yourself saying something, and it seems like a good idea at the time, but once you blurt it out you can hardly believe it's you speaking. What was I thinking?
#37. Even now it is no longer composed of the traditional political class, but of a composite layer of corporate leaders, high-level administrators, and the heads of the major professional, labor, political, and religious organisations.
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