Top 200 Jean Baudrillard Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “It is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality.”

— Jean Baudrillard

53. “Contact with men who wield power and authority still leaves an intangible sense of repulsion. It’s very like being in close proximity to fecal matter, the fecal embodiment of something unmentionable, and you wonder what it is made of and when it acquired its historically sacred character.”

— Jean Baudrillard

54. “Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory. Men have only had an unconscious since they lost a territory.”

— Jean Baudrillard

55. “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

56. “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

57. “Genius is childhood recaptured.”

— Jean Baudrillard

58. “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

59. “Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.”

— Jean Baudrillard

60. “At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance.”

— Jean Baudrillard

61. “The day the world ends, no one will be there, just as no one was there when it began. This is a scandal. Such a scandal for the human race that it is indeed capable collectively, out of spite, of hastening the end of the world by all means just so it can enjoy the show.”

— Jean Baudrillard

62. “One of the pleasures of travel is to dive into places where others are compelled to live and come out unscathed, full of the malicious pleasure of abandoning them to their fate.”

— Jean Baudrillard

63. “Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.”

— Jean Baudrillard

64. “Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.”

— Jean Baudrillard

65. “Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.”

— Jean Baudrillard

66. “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

67. “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

68. “You are born modern, you do not become so.”

— Jean Baudrillard

69. “Business owners are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an owner 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

70. “If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don’t speak, it’s because everything’s 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

71. “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

72. “One has never said better how much “humanism”, “normality”, “quality of life” were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.”

— Jean Baudrillard

73. “Sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public.”

— Jean Baudrillard

74. “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

75. “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

76. “All liberation affects Good and Evil equally. The liberation of morals and minds entails crimes and catastrophes. The liberation of law and pleasure leads inevitably to the liberation of crime.”

— Jean Baudrillard

77. “The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one side won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.”

— Jean Baudrillard

78. “Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.”

— Jean Baudrillard

79. “Everywhere today, in fact, the ideology of competition gives way to a ‘philosophy’ of self-fulfillment. In a more integrated society individuals no longer compete for the possession of goods, they actualize themselves in consumption.”

— Jean Baudrillard

80. “This is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.”

— Jean Baudrillard

81. “Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world. This is as marvelous as being there in the beginning.”

— Jean Baudrillard

82. “The hyperreal is the abolition of the real not by violent destruction, but by its assumption, elevation to the strength of the model. Anticipation, deterrence, preventive transfiguration, etc.: the model acts as a sphere of absorption of the real.”

— Jean Baudrillard

83. “It is in love with its limitless horizontality, as New York may be with its verticality.”

— Jean Baudrillard

84. “There is no human reason to be here, except for the sheer ecstasy of being crowded together.”

— Jean Baudrillard

85. “It is from the death of the social that socialism will emerge, as it is from the death of God that religions emerge.”

— Jean Baudrillard

86. “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

87. “The desert is no longer a landscape, it is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others.”

— Jean Baudrillard

88. “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

89. “The image is not a medium for which we have to find the proper use. It is what it is and it is beyond all our moral considerations. It is by its essence immoral, and the world’s becoming-image is an immoral process.”

— Jean Baudrillard

90. “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

91. “With the truth, you need to get rid of it as soon as possible and pass it on to someone else. As with illness, this is the only way to be cured of it. The person who keeps truth in his hands has lost...”

— Jean Baudrillard

92. “It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.”

— Jean Baudrillard

93. “The price we pay for the complexity of life is too high.”

— Jean Baudrillard

94. “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

95. “If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.”

— Jean Baudrillard

96. “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

97. “It is not enough for theory to describe and analyze, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes.”

— Jean Baudrillard

98. “The repentant, run-to-seed ultra-Leftists who have converted to humanitarianism, artificial inseminators of the widow and the orphan, themselves orphans of reality and malades imaginaires of politics, premature ejaculators of posthistory and hyperchondriacs of the dead body of ideology and morality.”

— Jean Baudrillard

99. “There are only a few images that are not forced to provide meaning, or have to go through the filter of a specific idea.”

— Jean Baudrillard

100. “The confrontation between America and Europe reveals not so much a rapprochement as a distortion, an unbridgeable rift. There isn’t just a gap between us, but a whole chasm of modernity.”

— Jean Baudrillard