Quotes by

Jean Baudrillard

If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals dont speak, its because everythings 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

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

The local is a shabby thing. Theres nothing worse than bringing us back down to our own little corner, our own territory, the radiant promiscuity of the face to face. A culture which has taken the risk of the universal, must perish by the universal. – Jean Baudrillard

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

We have dreamt of every woman there is, and dreamt too of the miracle that would bring us the pleasure of being a woman, for women have all the qualities — courage, passion, the capacity to love, cunning — whereas all our imagination can do is naively pile up the illusion of courage. – Jean Baudrillard

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

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 others food. – Jean Baudrillard

Genius is childhood recaptured. – Jean Baudrillard

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

We are all hostages, and we are all terrorists. This circuit has replaced that other one of masters and slaves, the dominating and the dominated, the exploiters and the exploited. It is worse than the one it replaces, but at least it liberates us from liberal nostalgia and the ruses of history. – Jean Baudrillard

Mistakes, scandals, and failures no longer signal catastrophe. The crucial thing is that they be made credible, and that the public be made aware of the efforts being expended in that direction. The marketing immunity of governments is similar to that of the major brands of washing powder. – Jean Baudrillard

Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved — commitment to a scenario. – Jean Baudrillard

We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself. – Jean Baudrillard

Terror is as much a part of the concept of truth as runniness is of the concept of jam. We wouldnt like jam if it didnt, by its very nature, ooze. We wouldnt like truth if it wasnt sticky, if, from time to time, it didnt ooze blood. – Jean Baudrillard

Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us. – Jean Baudrillard

If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams then you must still regard America today with the same naive enthusiasm as the generations that discovered the New World. – Jean Baudrillard

Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust. – Jean Baudrillard

What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world. – Jean Baudrillard

Here in the U.S., culture is not that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space and which has its own special columns in the newspapers – Jean Baudrillard

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