Top 200 Jean Baudrillard Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “In this country, it is not the highest virtue, nor the heroic act, that achieves fame, but the uncommon nature of the least significant destiny. There is plenty for everyone, then, since the more conformist the system as a whole becomes, the more millions of individuals there are who are set apart by some tiny peculiarity. The slightest vibration in a statistical model, the tiniest whim of a computer are enough to bathe some piece of abnormal behaviour, however banal, in a fleeting glow of fame.”

— Jean Baudrillard

153. “If you do not lend your car, your fountain pen or your wife to anyone, that is because these objects, according to the logic of jealously, are narcissistic equivalents of the ego: to lose them, or for them to be damaged, means castration.”

— Jean Baudrillard

154. “Freedom is not as free as is generally thought: it produces antibodies which rebel against it. Truth, too, is threatened from within, like a state battling with its own police force. If values enjoyed total immunity, they would be as lethal as a scientific truth.”

— Jean Baudrillard

155. “Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.”

— Jean Baudrillard

156. “Our sentimentality toward animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we hold them. Sentimentality is nothing but the infinitely degraded form of bestiality, the racist commiseration.”

— Jean Baudrillard

157. “What is one to do against an enemy whose weapons are conformism and stupidity? Should one make oneself more conformist and more stupid? If his strategy lies in cunning and achievement, should one make oneself more cunning, more of an achiever? Should one make oneself more mediatic than the media?”

— Jean Baudrillard

158. “When you take away verisimilitude, you do not automatically find the veridical but, perhaps, the implausible.”

— Jean Baudrillard

159. “Even the Middle Ages, which condemned and punished animals in due form, was in this way much closer to them than we are. They held them to be guilty: which was a way of honoring them. We take them for nothing, and it is on this basis that we are “human” with them.”

— Jean Baudrillard

160. “The presence is not deleted before the vacuum is cleared before a redoubling of presence that erases the opposition of the presence and absence.”

— Jean Baudrillard

161. “The heroes of humanitarian action are applauded: a good thing they’re there to rescue our honour! If you denounce this shroud-waving, again there is applause: thank goodness you’re there to say these things! It is often the same people who applaud. Sycophants, catechumens, proselytes, acolytes – to arms, all of you!”

— Jean Baudrillard

162. “The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject the real and the referential everywhere, to persuade us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production.”

— Jean Baudrillard

163. “Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theater, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication.”

— Jean Baudrillard

164. “It is in the sphere of the media that we most clearly see the event short-circuited by its immediate image-feedback. Information, news coverage, is always already there. When there are catastrophes, the reporters and photojournalists are there before the emergency services. If they could be, they would be there before the catastrophe, the best thing being to invent or cause the event so as to be first with the news.”

— Jean Baudrillard

165. “In New York, madmen are free. Put out on the streets, they’re not all that different from the punks, junk, junkies, alcoholics, beggars who fill it. It is unclear why a city, just as mad, would suddenly keep its madmen locked up, why should he deprive the movement of these samples of madness, if it, in one form or another, has already captured the entire city.”

— Jean Baudrillard

166. “It is no longer a question of killing, of devouring or seducing the Other, of facing him, of competing with him, of loving or hating the Other. It is first of all a matter of producing the Other. The Other is no longer an object of passion but an object of production. Maybe it is because the Other, in his radical otherness, or in his irreducible singularity, has become dangerous or unbearable.”

— Jean Baudrillard

167. “What every society looks for in continuing to produce, and to overproduce, is to restore the real that escapes it.”

— Jean Baudrillard

168. “It is to the unknown one yields most impulsively; it is toward the unknown that one feels the most total, the most instinctive obligation.”

— Jean Baudrillard

169. “The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.”

— Jean Baudrillard

170. “The feminine seduces because it is never where it thinks it is, or where it thinks itself.”

— Jean Baudrillard

171. “Each segment of the worm is directly reproduced as a whole worm, just as each cell of the American CEO can produce a new CEO.”

— Jean Baudrillard

172. “Any gloss on authors, their character traits or biographies, hides the fact that only bad writing has an author, good writing does not.”

— Jean Baudrillard

173. “Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.”

— Jean Baudrillard

174. “In the past, bad literature was made with high-flown sentiment; today, it is made with the unconscious.”

— Jean Baudrillard

175. “They say there is always a photographic moment to be seized where the most banal of beings yield up their secret identity. But what is interesting is their secret alterity, and rather than looking for the identity beneath the appearances, we should look for the mask beneath the identity, the figure which haunts us and diverts us from our identities – the masked divinity which, in effect, haunts each of us for a moment, one day or another.”

— Jean Baudrillard

176. “To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter. All the movements that only play on liberation, emancipation, on the resurrection of a subject of history, of the group, of the word based on “consciousness raising,” indeed a “raising of the unconscious” of subjects and of the masses, do not see that they are going in the direction of the system, whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech.”

— Jean Baudrillard

177. “This is free-market fanaticism, the fanaticism of indifference to its own values and, for that very reason, total intolerance towards those who differ by any passion whatsoever. The New World Order implies the extermination of everything different to integrate it into an indifferent world order. Is there still room between these two fanaticisms for a non-believer to exercise his liberty?”

— Jean Baudrillard

178. “We are dealing with a genuine Stockholm syndrome on a mass scale – when the hostage becomes the accomplice of the hostage taker – as well as a revolution of the concept of voluntary servitude and master-slave relations. When the entire society becomes an accomplice to those who took it hostage, but just as much when individuals split into, for themselves, hostage and hostage taker.”

— Jean Baudrillard

179. “Water, which in itself is silent, is just waiting to make a noise. In itself completely motionless, it is just waiting to move. Perfectly cold and harsh in itself, it nonetheless has the tepidness of salt and the mineral softness of fabric. Total abhorrence of dominant ideologies. And anti-gulagism is the dominant ideology today. The anti-gulag priests are every bit as bad as the gulag torturers. The sheep have taken over from the beasts of the Apocalypse.”

— Jean Baudrillard

180. “Action or exaction? Voting, petitions, solidarity, information, human rights: all these things are gently extorted from you in the form of personal or promotional blackmail.”

— Jean Baudrillard

181. “The individual, floating, but held on a leash like a dog, like an eye popping out of its socket, hanging on the end of its optic nerve, scanning the horizon through 180 degrees but not sending back any images – a disembodied panoptical terminal, runaway organ of a species of mutants.”

— Jean Baudrillard

182. “Power itself must be abolished -and not solely because of a refusal to be dominated, which is at the heart of all traditional struggles- but also, just as violently, in the refusal to dominate. Intelligence cannot, can never be in power because intelligence consists of this double refusal.”

— Jean Baudrillard

183. “True compassion is to suffer in silence for others.”

— Jean Baudrillard

184. “The image of a country of great dreams and universal prosperity, created by all the forces of a gigantic propaganda machine, has become the greatest deception that has poisoned the minds of millions around the world, but above all the Americans themselves. Their consciousness is still in sweet captivity and this captivity turned out to be stronger than the survival instinct.”

— Jean Baudrillard

185. “The strategy of power has long seemed founded on the apathy of the masses. The more passive they were, the more secure it was. But this logic is only characteristic of the bureaucratic and centralist phase of power. And it is this which today turns against it: the inertia it has fostered becomes the sign of its death.”

— Jean Baudrillard

186. “The Stockholm Syndrome, the Theatre of Cruelty, voluntary servitude, living coin, the ready made, the accursed share, the total social fact, dust-breeding, the perfect crime – we find all these figures in the reality-TV cocktail, in that potlatch of vacuousness. It even drags the judgement that condemns it into its vacuousness.”

— Jean Baudrillard

187. “If truth and reality can clearly come only from the subject and his consciousness, then illusion, which is the opposite of these, must necessarily come from elsewhere. From the world of the object, from some other thing than the subject. Illusion, like profusion, comes to us from the world.”

— Jean Baudrillard

188. “These old Australians or Californians who spend all their days staring at the ocean without leaving their limousines, which they have turned into their panoramic childhood sites and their coffins, and who dream there, while awaiting the last wave, the one that will come from the depths of the ocean to engulf them.”

— Jean Baudrillard

189. “The only impossible revolution, says Ceronetti in substance, one that is even inconceivable to reason, would be the revolution against machines- and this impossibility turns all other revolutions into a schizophrenic farce.”

— Jean Baudrillard

190. “The anxiety specific to leisure and the Coast. Too many forms of natural beauty artificially brought together. Too many villas, too many flowers. Villegiatura, nomenklatura: the same struggle. The same artificial privilege, whether it be that of the political bureaucracy or the luxuriance of lifestyle. Nature putrefied by leisure, purged of all barbarity, sickeningly comfortable – one day perhaps this dream climate, this heatwave of luxury will explode into one last forest fire.”

— Jean Baudrillard

191. “In the classical imagination, Evil was still a mythical power. There was still a Mephisto or a Frankenstein to embody the principle of Evil. Our evil is faceless and without imagination. We no longer need the Devil to steal our shadows. There are no powers doing battle above our heads, fighting over our souls. No longer any need for the lubricious agency of capital to extort our labour-power from us. We no longer have any shadows, any souls, and we are stakeholders in our own lives.”

— Jean Baudrillard

192. “We are simplified by technical manipulation.”

— Jean Baudrillard

193. “The politics that enter the university are those that come from history, a retro politics, emptied of substance and legalized in their superficial exercise.”

— Jean Baudrillard

194. “Our entire reality has become experimental. In the absence of any stable destiny, modern man has reached the point of unlimited experimentation on himself.”

— Jean Baudrillard

195. “When one looks at the emptiness of current art, the only question is how such a machine can continue to function in the absence of any new energy, in an atmosphere of critical disillusionment and commercial frenzy, and with all the players totally indifferent? If it can continue, how long will this illusion last? A hundred years, two hundred? This society is like a vessel whose edges move ever wider apart, and in which the water never comes to a boil.”

— Jean Baudrillard

196. “From the holocaust to the hologram: a fine programme.”

— Jean Baudrillard

197. “But neither art nor aesthetics is alone in being doomed to this melancholy destiny of living not beyond their means, but beyond their ends.”

— Jean Baudrillard

198. “There is no longer any difference between the economic and the political, because the same language reigns in both, from one end to the other; a society therefore where the political economy, literally speaking, is finally fully realized.”

— Jean Baudrillard

199. “Just as medieval society was balanced on God and the Devil, so ours is balanced on consumption and its denunciation.”

— Jean Baudrillard

200. “What happens on the other side of the truth, not in what would be false, but in what is more true than the true, more real than the real? Bizarre effects, certainly, and sacrileges, much more destructive of the order of truth than its pure negation. Singular and murderous power of the potentialization of the truth, of the potentialization of the real.”

— Jean Baudrillard