Top 35 Mark Fisher Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “No one is bored, everything is boring.”

— Mark Fisher

2. “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.”

— Mark Fisher

3. “Instead of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.”

— Mark Fisher

4. “The fantasy being that western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products.”

— Mark Fisher

5. “A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.”

— Mark Fisher

6. “The pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be properly understood, or healed, if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals.”

— Mark Fisher

7. “The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.”

— Mark Fisher

8. “The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. It is impossible to conceive of fascism or Stalinism without propaganda – but capitalism can proceed perfectly well, in some ways better, without anyone making a case for it.”

— Mark Fisher

9. “Those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever.”

— Mark Fisher

10. “What if you held a protest and everyone came?”

— Mark Fisher

11. “We could go so far as to say that it is the human condition to be grotesque, since the human animal is the one that does not fit in, the freak of nature who has no place in the natural order and is capable of re-combining nature’s products into hideous new forms.”

— Mark Fisher

12. “As any numbers of radical theorists from Brecht through to Foucault and Badiou have maintained, emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.”

— Mark Fisher

13. “Lowering our expectations, we are told, is a small price to pay for being protected from terror and totalitarianism.”

— Mark Fisher

14. “Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’ cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. ‘Alternative’ and ‘independent’ don’t designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream.”

— Mark Fisher

15. “If the figure of discipline was the worker-prisoner, the figure of control is the debtor-addict.”

— Mark Fisher

16. “The idea that the world we experience is a solipsistic delusion projected from the interior of our mind consoles rather than disturbs us, since it conforms with our infantile fantasies of omnipotence; but the thought that our so-called interiority owe its existence to a fictionalized consensus will always carry an uncanny charge.”

— Mark Fisher

17. “Assimilation is sometimes the most effective kind of assassination.”

— Mark Fisher

18. “Such innovations are unthinkable now that the public has been displaced by the consumer.”

— Mark Fisher

19. “The novel’s trick involved re-telling a classic Faery story – young women abducted into another world – using the conventions of realism. One of these conventions was giving the event a precise date. According to the novel, the three women disappeared on February 14th 1900... But Picnic at Hanging Rock is not set in our 1900, in which February 14th fell on a Wednesday, not a Saturday.”

— Mark Fisher

20. “The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.”

— Mark Fisher

21. “Capital demands that we always look busy, even if there’s no work to do. If neoliberalism’s magical voluntarism is to be believed, there are always opportunities to be chased or created; any time not spent hustling and hassling is time wasted. The whole city is forced into a gigantic simulation of activity, a fanaticism of productivism in which nothing much is actually produced, an economy made out of hot air and bland delirium.”

— Mark Fisher

22. “The stronger your mind is, the more insignificant your problems appear. This is the source of inner peace, so concentrate. This is one of the greatest keys to success.”

— Mark Fisher

23. “From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.”

— Mark Fisher

24. “Culture, and the analysis of culture, is valuable insofar as it allows an escape from ourselves.”

— Mark Fisher

25. “Capital follows you when you dream.”

— Mark Fisher

26. “It is not an exaggeration to say that being a teenager in late capitalist Britain is now close to being reclassified as a sickness.”

— Mark Fisher

27. “Today we see liberal capitalism and its political system, parliamentarianism, as the only natural and acceptable solutions’. Harvey argues that neoliberalization is best conceived of as a ‘political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites’. Harvey demonstrates that, in an era popularly described as ‘post-political’, class war has continued to be fought, but only by one side: the wealthy.”

— Mark Fisher

28. “What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.”

— Mark Fisher

29. “We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely depends upon the prior disavowal – we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads.”

— Mark Fisher

30. “Confronted with capital’s intense semiotic pollution, its encrustation of the urban environment with idiotic sigils and imbecilic slogans no-one – neither the people who wrote them nor those at whom they are aimed – believes, you often wonder: what if all the effort that went into this flashy trash were devoted to a public good?”

— Mark Fisher

31. “The relationship between capitalism and eco-disaster is neither coincidental nor accidental: capital’s ‘need of a constantly expanding market’, its ‘growth fetish’, mean that capitalism is by its very nature opposed to any notion of sustainability.”

— Mark Fisher

32. “The values that family life depends upon – obligation, trustworthiness, commitment – are precisely those which are held to be obsolete in the new capitalism.”

— Mark Fisher

33. “Capital can never openly admit that it is a system based on inhuman rapacity; the Terminator can never remove its human mask.”

— Mark Fisher

34. “Identification with the alien meant the possibility of an escape from identity, into other subjectivities, other worlds.”

— Mark Fisher

35. “They knew that satiation wasn’t succeeded by tristesse, it was itself, immediately, tristesse. Satiation is the point at which you must face the existential revelation that you didn’t want really want what you seemed so desperate to have, that your most urgent desires are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road. If you ‘can’t replace the fear or the thrill of the chase’, why stir yourself to pursue yet another empty kill? Why carry on with the charade?”

— Mark Fisher

36. “In this lukewarm world, ambient discontent hides in plain view, a hazy malaise given off by the refrigerators, television sets and other consumer durables. The vividness and plausibility of this miserable world – with misery itself contributing to the world’s plausibility – somehow becomes all the more intense when its status is downgraded to that of a constructed simulation. The world is a simulation but it still feels real.”

— Mark Fisher

37. “Really Existing Capitalism is marked by the same division which characterized Really Existing Socialism, between, on the one hand, an official culture in which capitalist enterprises are presented as socially responsible and caring, and, on the other, a widespread awareness that companies are actually corrupt, ruthless, etc. In other words, capitalist postmodernity.”

— Mark Fisher