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Quotes by 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
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
Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.
– Jean Baudrillard
Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
– 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
Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.
– 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
I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?
– Jean Baudrillard
If everything on television is, without exception, part of a low-calorie (or even no-calorie) diet, then what good is it complaining about the adverts? By their worthlessness, they at least help to make the programmes around them seem of a higher level.
– Jean Baudrillard
If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.
– 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
In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.
– 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 don't even arise.
– Jean Baudrillard
It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.
– 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
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
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
Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.
– 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
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 other's food.
– 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
Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
– Jean Baudrillard
Terror is as much a part of the concept of truth as runniness is of the concept of jam. We wouldn't like jam if it didn't, by its very nature, ooze. We wouldn't like truth if it wasn't sticky, if, from time to time, it didn't ooze blood.
– Jean Baudrillard
The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.
– Jean Baudrillard
The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.
– Jean Baudrillard
The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.
– Jean Baudrillard
The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.
– 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
The very definition of the real becomes: 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. The hyper real.
– Jean Baudrillard
There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each. This is not just a stock of affects or pleasure, but also the possibility of playing double or quits with the share you hold in the other's heart.
– Jean Baudrillard
There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.
– Jean Baudrillard
There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.
– Jean Baudrillard
To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.
– 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
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
What is a society without a heroic dimension?
– 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
The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.
– Jean Baudrillard
Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.
– Jean Baudrillard
A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.
– Jean Baudrillard