Slavoj Zizek Quotes

#1. 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

#2. The moment we think in the terms of 'Yes, the WTC collapse was a tragedy, but we should not fully solidarize with the victims, since this would mean supporting US imperialism', the ethical catastrophe is already here: the only appropriate stance is unconditional solidarity with all victims.

Slavoj Zizek

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. Atheism is not the denial of the existence of God, but having doubts as to whether God is conscious.

Slavoj Zizek

#6. We're not dreamers. We're awaking from a dream turning into a nightmare. We're not destroying anything. We're watching the system destroy itself.

Slavoj Zizek

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.

Slavoj Zizek

#11. Ideology today is unfreedom which you sincerely personally experience as freedom.

Slavoj Zizek

#12. Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.

Slavoj Zizek

#13. You can be an extreme materialist, thinking that economic development ultimately determines everything; then you are truly ideological.

Slavoj Zizek

#14. Every civilisation that disavows its barbarian potential has already capitulated to barbarism.

Slavoj Zizek

#15. 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

#16. I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

Slavoj Zizek

#17. What if culture itself is nothing but a halt, a break, a respite, in the pursuit of barbarity?

Slavoj Zizek

#18. In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being.

Slavoj Zizek

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. As a Marxist, let me add: if anyone tells you Lacan is difficult, this is class propaganda by the enemy.

Slavoj Zizek

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard.

Slavoj Zizek

#25. It's bad if we are controlled, but if we're not, it can be even worse.

Slavoj Zizek

#26. 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

#27. Liberal democracy - as you know, in the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today's left effectively offers global capitalism with a human face, more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not.

Slavoj Zizek

#28. 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

#29. Communism will win.

Slavoj Zizek

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.

Slavoj Zizek

#33. 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

#34. One does not wait for the "ripe" objective circumstances to make a revolution, circumstances become "ripe" through the political struggle itself.

Slavoj Zizek

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. . . . 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

#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

#40. The force of universalism is in you Basques, not in the Spanish state

Slavoj Zizek

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. Thinking begins when you ask really difficult questions.

Slavoj Zizek

#44. The proper way for the woman to test the man's love is thus to "betray" him at a crucial moment in his career

Slavoj Zizek

#45. You cannot change people but you can change the system so that people are not pushed into doing evil things.

Slavoj Zizek

#46. 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

#47. The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.

Slavoj Zizek

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

Slavoj Zizek

#49. Come on. I don't have any problem violating my own insights in practice.

Slavoj Zizek

#50. In contrast to modern art, which causes displeasure-modern art, by definition, hurts. In this precise sense, modern art is sublime: it causes pleasure-in-pain, it produces its effect through its own failure, insofar as it refers to the impossible Things.

Slavoj Zizek

#51. 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

#52. Does everything that exists have to be grounded in sufficient reasons? Or are there things that somehow happen out of nowhere?

Slavoj Zizek

#53. 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

#54. Nowadays, you can do anything that you want - anal, oral, fisting - but you need to be wearing gloves, condoms, protection.

Slavoj Zizek

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. ... I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality.

Slavoj Zizek

#58. The Christian motto 'All men are brothers', however, also means that those who do not accept brotherhood are not men.

Slavoj Zizek

#59. Ultimately,we hear things because we cannot see everything.

Slavoj Zizek

#60. I affirm myself to be a Lacanian, for fear of being convienced by others that I am not a Lacanian

Slavoj Zizek

#61. 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

#62. For me, ideology is defined only by how the coordinates of your meaningful experience of the world, and your place within society, relate to the basic tensions and antagonisms of social orders.

Slavoj Zizek

#63. An entity is free when it can deploy its immanent potential without being impeded by any external obstacle.

Slavoj Zizek

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. I am what you might call abstractly anti-capitalist. For instance, I am suspicious of the old leftists who focus all their hatred on the United States. What about Chinese neo-colonialism? Why are the left silent about that? When I say this, it annoys them, of course. Good!

Slavoj Zizek

#67. The minimum necessary structuring ingredient of every ideology is to distance itself from another ideology, to denounce its other as ideology.

Slavoj Zizek

#68. Like love, ideology is blind, even if people caught up in it are not

Slavoj Zizek

#69. In short, the ultimate source of Evil is compasion itself

Slavoj Zizek

#70. In Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.

Slavoj Zizek

#71. 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

#72. The fantasy which serves as a support for the figure of the Stalinist Communist is therefore exactly the same as the fantasy which is at work in the Tom and Jerry cartoons.

Slavoj Zizek

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom- war on terror and so on-falsifies freedom.

Slavoj Zizek

#76. 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

#77. Nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware of their
corrupted nature, but we participate in them, we display our belief in
them, because we assume that they work even if we do not believe in
them

Slavoj Zizek

#78. 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

#79. the only choice is that between direct or indirect relations of domination and exploitation, with any alternative dismissed as utopian.

Slavoj Zizek

#80. We need useless theory more than ever today.

Slavoj Zizek

#81. The more opera is dead, the more it flourishes.

Slavoj Zizek

#82. 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

#83. I do all my work to escape myself. I don't believe in looking into yourself. If you do this, you just discover a lot of shit. I think what we should do is throw ourselves out of ourselves. The truth is not deep in ourselves. The truth is outside.

Slavoj Zizek

#84. 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

#85. The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other

Slavoj Zizek

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

Slavoj Zizek

#87. 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

#88. We live in weird times in which we are compelled to behave as if we are free, so that the unsayable is not our freedom but the very fact of our servitude.

Slavoj Zizek

#89. 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

#90. When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.

Slavoj Zizek

#91. A spectre is haunting Western academia ( ... ), the spectre of the Cartesian subject.

Slavoj Zizek

#92. It is the reign of contemporary global capitalism which is the true Lord of Misrule.

Slavoj Zizek

#93. 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

#94. Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.

Slavoj Zizek

#95. Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.

Slavoj Zizek

#96. We usually speak of the Jewish-Christian civilization perhaps, the time has come, especially with regard to the Middle East conflict, to talk about the Jewish-Muslim civilization as an axis opposed to Christianity.

Slavoj Zizek

#97. If you have reasons to love someone, you don't love them.

Slavoj Zizek

#98. 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

#99. We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

Slavoj Zizek

#100. What we philosophers can do is just correct the questions.

Slavoj Zizek