Top 200 Jean Baudrillard Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Philosophy leads to death, sociology leads to suicide.”

— Jean Baudrillard

Featured in: Depressing Quotes

2. “Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.”

— Jean Baudrillard

Featured in: Quotes About Feelings

3. “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”

— Jean Baudrillard

4. “What I am, I don’t know. I am the simulacrum of myself.”

— Jean Baudrillard

5. “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.”

— Jean Baudrillard

6. “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”

— Jean Baudrillard

7. “Art does not die because there is no more art. It dies because there is too much.”

— Jean Baudrillard

8. “When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.”

— Jean Baudrillard

9. “Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.”

— Jean Baudrillard

10. “It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire but our own: The desert of the real itself.”

— Jean Baudrillard

11. “The only thing worse than being bored is being boring.”

— Jean Baudrillard

12. “All societies end up wearing masks.”

— Jean Baudrillard

13. “The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.”

— Jean Baudrillard

14. “Postmodernity is the simultaneity of the destruction of earlier values and their reconstruction. It is renovation within ruination.”

— Jean Baudrillard

15. “Art is no longer anything more than a kind of meta-language for banality.”

— Jean Baudrillard

16. “It is perhaps not a surprise that photography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality started to disappear. It is even perhaps the disappearance of reality that triggered this technical form. Reality found a way to mutate into an image.”

— Jean Baudrillard

17. “Challenge, and not desire, lies at the heart of seduction.”

— Jean Baudrillard

18. “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

19. “Simulation is the situation created by any system of signs when it becomes sophisticated enough, autonomous enough, to abolish its own referent and to replace it with itself.”

— Jean Baudrillard

20. “Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true .”

— Jean Baudrillard

21. “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

Featured in: Meaning of Life Quotes

22. “Today’s terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.”

— Jean Baudrillard

23. “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

24. “The new shopping malls make possible the synthesis of all consumer activities, not least of which are shopping, flirting with objects, idle wandering, and all the permutations of these.”

— Jean Baudrillard

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body.”

— Jean Baudrillard

29. “Power is only too happy to make football bear a diabolical responsibility for stupifying the masses.”

— Jean Baudrillard

30. “Forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself.”

— Jean Baudrillard

31. “You think you photograph a particular scene for the pleasure it gives. In fact it’s the scene that wants to be photographed. You’re merely an extra in the production.”

— Jean Baudrillard

32. “The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost it’s meaning.”

— Jean Baudrillard

33. “Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality.”

— Jean Baudrillard

34. “Terrorism, like viruses, is everywhere. There is a global perfusion of terrorism, which accompanies any system of domination as though it were its shadow, ready to activate itself anywhere, like a double agent.”

— Jean Baudrillard

35. “For me, the photography, in its purest form, is a variant of the fable. Another way of saving the appearances – a way of signifying, through this fabulous capture, that this supposed real world is always about to lose its meaning and its reality...”

— Jean Baudrillard

36. “A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.”

— Jean Baudrillard

37. “History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history.”

— Jean Baudrillard

38. “The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity’s language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity’s disappearance.”

— Jean Baudrillard

39. “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

40. “Power floats like money, like language, like theory.”

— Jean Baudrillard

41. “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

42. “The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance, but deceit and fraud.”

— Jean Baudrillard

43. “America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.”

— Jean Baudrillard

44. “Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened.”

— Jean Baudrillard

45. “You have to know how to disappear.”

— Jean Baudrillard

46. “In our culture, futility plays the role of transgression and fashion is condemned for having within it the force of the pure sign which signifies nothing.”

— Jean Baudrillard

47. “One can speak of an alterity of desire – a paradigm defined outside the tired, tacitly accepted regime, but one comes up short when attempting to posit a framework of desire beyond available, known desires.”

— Jean Baudrillard

48. “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

49. “Every photographed object is merely the trace left behind by the disappearance of all the rest. It is an almost perfect crime, an almost total resolution of the world, which merely leave the illusion of a particular object shining forth, the image of which then becomes an impenetrable enigma.”

— Jean Baudrillard

50. “So-called ‘realist’ photography does not capture the ‘what is.’ Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.”

— Jean Baudrillard