Quotes by

Jean Baudrillard

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

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 Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.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

You are born modern, you do not become so. – Jean Baudrillard

In days gone by, we were afraid of dying in dishonor or a state of sin. Nowadays, we are afraid of dying fools. Now the fact is that there is no Extreme Unction to absolve us of foolishness. We endure it here on earth as subjective eternity. – Jean Baudrillard

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

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

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated. – Jean Baudrillard

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

Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless dont even arise. – Jean Baudrillard

At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves. – Jean Baudrillard

Pornography is the quadraphonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules. Science has already habituated us to this microscopics, this excess of the real in its microscopic detail, this voyeurism of exactitude. – Jean Baudrillard

The order of the world is always right — such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin. – Jean Baudrillard

There is no aphrodisiac like innocence. – Jean Baudrillard

There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you. – Jean Baudrillard

Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void. – Jean Baudrillard

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

Executives are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an executive away from his business, he goes on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business. He never stops hurtling onwards, making decisions and executing them. – Jean Baudrillard

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are. – Jean Baudrillard

The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. Its the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism. – Jean Baudrillard

The very definition of the real has become: 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: that is the hyperreal – Jean Baudrillard