Top 60 Raoul Vaneigem Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Purchasing power is a license to purchase power.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

2. “The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

3. “Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?”

— Raoul Vaneigem

4. “Any remnants of passionate tension between sexual pleasure and the adventurous quest for it are fast disintegrating into a panting succession of mechanically repeated gestures whose rhythm offers no hope of approaching so much as a semblance of orgasm. The quantitative Eros of speed, rapid change, and love-against-the-clock everywhere disfigures the face of real pleasure.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

5. “The world of the commodity is a world upside-down, which bases itself not upon life but upon the transformation of life into work.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

6. “People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

7. “In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

8. “Work is the opposite of creativity.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

9. “Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

10. “In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

11. “It is entirely up to us to invent our own lives.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

12. “Whatever you possess possesses you in return.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

13. “Hope is the leash of submission.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

14. “We have a world of pleasure to win, and nothing to lose but boredom.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

15. “Daydreaming subverts the world.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

16. “People are bewitched into believing that time slips away, and this belief is the basis of time actually slipping away.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

17. “In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

18. “Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume; the hellish cycle is complete.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

19. “The history of our times calls to mind those Walt Disney characters who rush madly over the edge of a cliff without seeing it, so that the power of their imagination keeps them suspended in mid-air; but as soon as they look down and see where they are, they fall.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

20. “People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure, but of the use to which they are.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

21. “We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

22. “There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man’s life than in all the philosophies.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

23. “Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

24. “Production and consumption are the nipples of modern society. Thus suckled, humanity grows in strength and beauty; rising standard of living, all modern conveniences, distractions of all kinds, culture for all, the comfort of your dreams.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

25. “I do not dream of a gentle revolution. My passion runs to the violence of supersession, the ferocity of a life that renounces nothing.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

26. “Everywhere the same law holds good: ‘There is no weapon of your individual will which, once appropriated by others, does not turn against you.’ If.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

27. “To work for delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable from preparing for a general insurrection.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

28. “It is much more a lack of fun which batters us than over abundance and indulgence.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

29. “Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

30. “Identification with an ethnic or national community, with a religion, ideology, or any abstraction is nothing but a blood-soaked delusion.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

31. “Suffering is the pain of constraints. An atom of pure delight, no matter how small, can hold it at bay.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

32. “The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

33. “What could I wish for the present but to take the greatest pleasure in being what I am?”

— Raoul Vaneigem

34. “The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

35. “No more Guernicas, no more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin?”

— Raoul Vaneigem

36. “Henceforward, no revolution will be worth the name if it does not at the very least imply the radical elimination of all hierarchy.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

37. “The millions of human beings who were shot, tortured, starved, treated like animals and made the object of a conspiracy of ridicule, can sleep in peace in their communal graves, for at least the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to believe, on the strength of their daily dose of television, that they are happy and free. The Communards went down, fighting to the last, so that you too could qualify for a Caribbean cruise.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

38. “To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

39. “Real friends care little for forms.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

40. “If I must die, at least let me die as I have occasionally loved.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

41. “As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

42. “In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

43. “My creativity, no matter how poor, is for me a far better guide than all the knowledge with which my head has been crammed. In the night of Power, its glimmer keeps the enemy forces at bay.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

44. “God cannot know anything, will anything or do anything without me. With God I created myself, I created all things, and my hand holds up heaven, earth and all the creatures of the earth. Without me there is nothing.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

45. “Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

46. “Oppression is no longer centralized, for it is everywhere. The positive aspect of this disintegration is that everyone begins to see, in their state of almost complete isolation, that they must first save themselves, make themselves the centre, and from their own subjectivity build a world where they can be at home anywhere.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

47. “Each component of the organism, like the individual in the social body, possesses the capacity for enjoyment of the self through sharing with others.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

48. “The harder you run after time, the faster time goes: this is the law of the consumable. Try to stop it, and it will wear you out and age you all the more easily. Time must be caught on the wing, in the present – but the present has yet to be constructed.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

49. “Because of its increasing triviality, everyday life has gradually become our central preoccupation.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

50. “I refuse to be called by any name, and suddenly, beneath the unnameable, I discover the wealth of lived experience, inexpressible poetry, the preconditions of supersession.”

— Raoul Vaneigem