Guy Debord Quotes

#1. I'm also a book nerd so aside from my life and my opinions, you could say my lyrics are inspired in some sense by the writings of Guy Debord, John Berryman, Georges Bataille, T.S. Eliot, Albert Camus, Bukowski, Artaud, Derrick Jensen and bunch of other people.

Dominic Owen Mallary

#2. In our society now, we prefer to see ourselves living than living.

Guy Debord

#3. Conversely, real life is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, and ends up absorbing it and aligning itself with it.

Guy Debord

#4. The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the dominant system of production - signs which are at the same time the ultimate end-products of that system.

Guy Debord

#5. Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.

Guy Debord

#6. Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.

Guy Debord

#7. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.

Guy Debord

#8. In a world that has REALLY been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.

Guy Debord

#9. I have written less than most writers. But I have drunk far more than most drinkers.

Guy Debord

#10. What appears is good; what is good appears.

Guy Debord

#11. System, as the advanced economic sector which directly shapes a growing multitude of image-objects, the spectacle is the main production of present-day society.

Guy Debord

#12. Work is only justified by leisure time. To admit the emptiness of leisure time is to admit the impossibility of life.

Guy Debord

#13. The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.

Guy Debord

#14. The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but it unites it only in its separateness.

Guy Debord

#15. In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

Guy Debord

#16. The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

Guy Debord

#17. As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.

Guy Debord

#18. People who personify the system are indeed well known for not being what they seem to be; they have achieved greatness by embracing a level of reality lower than that of the most insignificant individual life- and everyone knows it.

Guy Debord

#19. I have written much less than most people who write; I have drunk much more than most people who drink.

Guy Debord

#20. The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.

Guy Debord

#21. Behind the masks of total choice, different forms of the same alienation confront each other.

Guy Debord

#22. The passions have been sufficiently interpreted; the point now is to discover new ones.

Guy Debord

#23. There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.

Guy Debord

#24. The power to homogenize is the heavy artillery that has battered down all Chinese walls.

Guy Debord

#25. Capital is no longer the invisible center governing the production process; as it accumulates, it spreads to the ends of the earth in the form of tangible objects. The entire expanse of society is its portrait.

Guy Debord

#26. Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

Guy Debord

#27. Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.

Guy Debord

#28. ... in the case where the self is merely represented and ideally presented (vorgestellt), there it is not actual: where it is by proxy, it is not. -Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind

Guy Debord

#29. Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.

Guy Debord

#30. No longer is science asked to understand the world, or to improve any part of it. It is asked instead to immediately justify everything that happens ... spectacular domination has cut down the vast tree of scientific knowledge in order to make itself a truncheon.

Guy Debord

#31. Everyone accepts that there are inevitably little areas of secrecy reserved for specialists; as regards things in general, many believe they are in on the secret.

Guy Debord

#32. With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.

Guy Debord

#33. With the generalized separation of the worker and his products, every unitary view of accomplished activity and all direct personal communication among producers are lost.

Guy Debord

#34. In the spectacle - the visual reflection of the ruling economic order - goals are nothing, development is everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.

Guy Debord

#35. the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle's essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life - a negation that has taken on a visible form.

Guy Debord

#36. We still have some time to take advantage of the fact that radio and television stations are not yet guarded by the army.

Guy Debord

#37. As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specialisations that they actually live.

Guy Debord

#38. Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity

Guy Debord

#39. Of the small number of things which I have liked and done well, drinking is by far the thing I have done best. Although I have read a lot, I have drunk more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk more than the majority of the people who drink.

Guy Debord

#40. Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it

Guy Debord

#41. Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state's monopoly of armed violence.

Guy Debord

#42. What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic. And what is genuine is reconstructed as quickly as possible, to resemble the false.

Guy Debord

#43. He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with.

Guy Debord

#44. Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.

Guy Debord

#45. But a lie that can no longer be challenged becomes insane.

Guy Debord

#46. An organization must always remember that its objective is not getting
people to listen to speeches by experts, but getting them to speak for
themselves.

Guy Debord

#47. Basketball is not a collection of jams, but a social relation among players, mediated by Michael Jordan.

Guy Debord

#48. Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.

Guy Debord

#49. The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.

Guy Debord

#50. This society eliminates geographical distance only to produce a new internal separation.

Guy Debord

#51. None of the activity stolen by work can be regained by submitting to what work has produced. - The Society of The Spectacle

Guy Debord

#52. The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.

Guy Debord

#53. So far from realizing philosophy, the spectacle philosophizes reality, and turns the material life of everyone into a universe of speculation.

Guy Debord

#54. The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive ... compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.

Guy Debord

#55. In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

Guy Debord

#56. The spectacle is nothing more than the common language of this separation. What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.

Guy Debord

#57. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.

Guy Debord

#58. Art ... can become the direct organisation of more highly evolved sensations.

Guy Debord

#59. In the zone of perdition where my youth went as if to complete its education, one would have said that the portents of an imminent collapse of the whole edifice of civilization had made an appointment.

Guy Debord

#60. Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Guy Debord

#61. The advertisements during intermissions are the truest reflection of an intermission from life.

Guy Debord