Top 200 Jean Baudrillard Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us unintelligibly, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.”

— Jean Baudrillard

102. “The Yuppies are not defectors from revolt, they are a new race, assured, amnestied, exculpated, moving with ease in the world of performance, mentally indifferent to any objective other than that of change and advertising.”

— Jean Baudrillard

103. “The sickly cultural pathos which the whole of France indulges in, that fetishism of the cultural heritage.”

— Jean Baudrillard

104. “It is exciting to hear one of your fondest ideas formulated in one fell swoop, better than you could have done yourself.”

— Jean Baudrillard

105. “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

106. “In its artless cruelty, Dallas is superior to any “intelligent” critique that can be made of it. That is why intellectual snobberymeets its match here.”

— Jean Baudrillard

107. “I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again.”

— Jean Baudrillard

108. “Intellectuals are doomed to disappear when artificial intelligence bursts on the scene, just as the heroes of silent cinema disappeared with the coming of the talkies. We are all Buster Keatons.”

— Jean Baudrillard

109. “Take your desires for reality!” can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power.”

— Jean Baudrillard

110. “Desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.”

— Jean Baudrillard

111. “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

112. “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.”

— Jean Baudrillard

113. “Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stock-exchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared.”

— Jean Baudrillard

114. “Smile and others will smile back.”

— Jean Baudrillard

115. “How many faces, how many bodies can you recognize, with your eyes closed, only by touching them? Have you ever closed your eyes and acted unconsciously? Or loved someone so blindly, you could almost feel their energy in a dark room and be moved by the powerful touch of their ideas?”

— Jean Baudrillard

116. “And so art is everywhere, since artifice is at the very heart of reality. And so art is dead, not only because its critical transcendence is gone, but because reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image. Reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality. It no longer even surpasses fiction: it captures every dream even before it takes on the appearance of a dream.”

— Jean Baudrillard

117. “The old slogan ‘truth is stranger than fiction,’ that still corresponded to the surrealist phase of this estheticization of life, is obsolete. There is no more fiction that life could possibly confront, even victoriously-it is reality itself that disappears utterly in the game of reality-radical disenchantment, the cool and cybernetic phase following the hot stage of fantasy.”

— Jean Baudrillard

118. “When everything is social, suddenly nothing is.”

— Jean Baudrillard

119. “A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences.”

— Jean Baudrillard

120. “All contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event.”

— Jean Baudrillard

121. “Are the mass media on the side of the power in the manipulation of the masses, or are they on the side of the masses in the liquidation of meaning, in the violence perpetrated on meaning, and in fascination? Is it the media that induce fascination in the masses, or is it the masses who direct the media into the spectacle?”

— Jean Baudrillard

122. “The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point.”

— Jean Baudrillard

123. “Pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the “true” and the “false,” the “real” and the “imaginary.”

— Jean Baudrillard

124. “To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending.”

— Jean Baudrillard

125. “There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. Appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism. This is where seduction begins.”

— Jean Baudrillard

126. “The whole world thus becomes integrated as a spectacle into the domestic universe.”

— Jean Baudrillard

127. “If it could, capitalism would make due with white rats.”

— Jean Baudrillard

128. “I vote, I participate, I am present, I am concerned” – mirror of a paradoxical mockery, mirror of the indifference of all public signification.”

— Jean Baudrillard

129. “All these things – Factories, asylums, prisons, schools still exist and will no doubt continue to exist for an indefinite period as warning signs, to divert the reality of the domination of capital into an imaginary materiality. There have always been churches to hide the death of God, or to hide the fact that the God is everywhere, which amounts to the same thing.”

— Jean Baudrillard

130. “We live of seduction, but die Fascination.”

— Jean Baudrillard

131. “The surprises of thought are like those of love: they wear out. But here too you can carry on for a long time doing your conjugal duty.”

— Jean Baudrillard

132. “All we have left of liberty is an ad-man’s illusion.”

— Jean Baudrillard

133. “There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.”

— Jean Baudrillard

134. “A thing which has lost its idea is like the man who has lost his shadow, and it must either fall under the sway of madness or perish.”

— Jean Baudrillard

135. “A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.”

— Jean Baudrillard

136. “This false distance is present everywhere: in spy films, in Godard, in modern advertising, which uses it continually as a cultural allusion. It is not really clear in the end whether this ‘cool’ smile is the smile of humour or that of commercial complicity. This is also the case with pop, and its smile ultimately encapsulates all its ambiguity: it is not the smile of critical distance, but the smile of collusion.”

— Jean Baudrillard

137. “Something escapes us, and we are escaping from ourselves, or losing ourselves, as part of an irreversible process; we have now passed some point of no return, the point where the contradictoriness of things ended, and we find ourselves, still alive, in a universe of non-contradiction, of enthusiasm, of ecstasy – of stupor in the face of a process which, for all its irreversibility, is bereft of meaning.”

— Jean Baudrillard

138. “We are all transsexuals, just as we are biological mutants in potentia. This is not a biological issue, however: we are all transsexuals symbolically.”

— Jean Baudrillard

139. “Man has become less rational than his own objects, which now run ahead of him, so to speak, organizing his surroundings and thus appropriating his actions.”

— Jean Baudrillard

140. “It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable.”

— Jean Baudrillard

141. “As soon as you enter the system to denounce it, you are automatically made a part of it. There is no ideal omega point today from which hard and fast judgments can be made. You can see that those who make accusations against the political class are the same ones who replenish it. The class is fed by the accusations made against it. Even the bluntest critic is caught up in this circularity.”

— Jean Baudrillard

142. “The clones are already there; the virtual beings are already there. We are all replicants! We are so in the sense that, as in Blade Runner, it is already almost impossible to distinguish properly human behaviour from its projection on the screen, from its double in the image and its computerized prostheses.”

— Jean Baudrillard

143. “For the heavenly fire no longer strikes depraved cities, it is rather the lens which cuts through ordinary reality like a laser, putting it to death.”

— Jean Baudrillard

144. “In order to understand the intensity of ritual forms, one must rid oneself of the idea that all happiness derives from nature, and all pleasure from the satisfaction of a desire. On the contrary, games, the sphere of play, reveal a passion for rules, a giddiness born of rules, and a force that comes from ceremony, and not desire.”

— Jean Baudrillard

145. “Twins were deified, and sacrificed, in a more savage culture: hypersimilitude was equivalent to the murder of the original, and thus to a pure non-meaning.”

— Jean Baudrillard

146. “What is man if the signs that predate him have such power? A human race has to invent sacrifices equal to the natural cataclysmic order that surrounds it.”

— Jean Baudrillard

147. “The real joy of writing lies in the opportunity of being able to sacrifice a whole chapter for a single sentence, a complete sentence for a single word...”

— Jean Baudrillard

148. “For everything that has not successfully transcended itself can only fall prey to revivals without end.”

— Jean Baudrillard

149. “To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have.”

— Jean Baudrillard

150. “But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum – not unreal, but simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.”

— Jean Baudrillard