Top 60 Guy Debord Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”

— Guy Debord

2. “The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.”

— Guy Debord

3. “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

4. “Behind the masks of total choice, different forms of the same alienation confront each other.”

— Guy Debord

5. “Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.”

— Guy Debord

6. “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

7. “In our society now, we prefer to see ourselves living than living.”

— Guy Debord

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

— Guy Debord

9. “Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.”

— Guy Debord

10. “Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity.”

— Guy Debord

11. “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

12. “The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.”

— Guy Debord

13. “Work is only justified by leisure time. To admit the emptiness of leisure time is to admit the impossibility of life.”

— Guy Debord

14. “Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.”

— Guy Debord

15. “Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it.”

— Guy Debord

16. “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

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17. “None of the activity stolen by work can be regained by submitting to what work has produced. – The Society of The Spectacle.”

— Guy Debord

18. “In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.”

— Guy Debord

19. “The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified. 6. The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society.”

— Guy Debord

20. “The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.”

— Guy Debord

21. “The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is: “What appears is good; what is good appears.” The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply.”

— Guy Debord

22. “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

24. “Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.”

— Guy Debord

25. “Among the small number of things that I have liked and known how to do well, what I have assuredly known how to do best is drink. Even though I have read a lot, I have drunk even more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk much more than most people who drink.”

— Guy Debord

26. “The advertisements during intermissions are the truest reflection of an intermission from life.”

— Guy Debord

27. “What appears is good; what is good appears.”

— Guy Debord

28. “This society eliminates geographical distance only to produce a new internal separation.”

— Guy Debord

29. “When art becomes independent and paints its world in dazzling colors, a moment of life has grown old. Such a moment cannot be rejuvenated by dazzling colors, it can only be evoked in memory. The greatness of art only emerges at the dusk of life.”

— Guy Debord

30. “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

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31. “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.”

— Guy Debord

32. “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

33. “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

34. “Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.”

— Guy Debord

35. “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

36. “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

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

— Guy Debord

38. “The spectacle is a permanent opium war designed to force people to equate goods with commodities and to equate satisfaction with a survival that expands according to its own laws.”

— Guy Debord

39. “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

40. “I have written much less than most people who write; I have drunk much more than most people who drink.”

— Guy Debord

41. “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

42. “The things the spectacle presents as eternal are based on change, and must change as their foundations change. The spectacle is totally dogmatic, yet it is incapable of arriving at any really solid dogma. Nothing stands still for it. This instability is the spectacle’s natural condition, but it is completely contrary to its natural inclination.”

— Guy Debord

43. “Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this world, of a global social practice split into reality and image. The social practice confronted by an autonomous spectacle is at the same time the real totality which contains that spectacle. But the split within this totality mutilates it to the point that the spectacle seems to be its goal.”

— Guy Debord

44. “The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but it unites it only in its separateness.”

— Guy Debord

45. “We must destroy the Spectacle itself, the whole apparatus of the commodity society... We must abolish the pseudo-needs and false desires which the system manufactures daily in order to preserve its power.”

— Guy Debord

46. “The spectacle is the epic poem of this struggle, a struggle that no fall of Troy can bring to an end. The spectacle does not sing of men and their arms, but of commodities and their passions.”

— Guy Debord

47. “The passions have been sufficiently interpreted; the point now is to discover new ones.”

— Guy Debord

48. “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

49. “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

50. “He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with.”

— Guy Debord