Top 60 Slavoj Žižek Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.”

— Slavoj Žižek

Featured in: Quotes About Humanity

2. “The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to “be active”, to “participate”, to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.”

— Slavoj Žižek

3. “We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”

— Slavoj Žižek

4. “If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.”

— Slavoj Žižek

5. “What if the way we perceive a problem is already part of the problem?”

— Slavoj Žižek

6. “I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.”

— Slavoj Žižek

7. “Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn’t give you what you desire – it tells you how to desire.”

— Slavoj Žižek

Featured in: Desire Quotes, Filmmaking Quotes

8. “Thinking begins when you ask really difficult questions.”

— Slavoj Žižek

9. “Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.”

— Slavoj Žižek

10. “Often, the worst way to become prisoner of a system is to have a dream that things may turn better, there is always the possibility of change. Because it is precisely this secret dream that keeps you enslaved to the system.”

— Slavoj Žižek

11. “We need useless theory more than ever today.”

— Slavoj Žižek

12. “I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.”

— Slavoj Žižek

13. “The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.”

— Slavoj Žižek

14. “The horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things – they always do. It’s that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.”

— Slavoj Žižek

15. “You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.”

— Slavoj Žižek

Featured in: Being Happy Quotes

16. “The true ethical test is not only the readiness to save the victims, but also – even more, perhaps – the ruthless dedication to annihilating those who made them victims.”

— Slavoj Žižek

17. “Global capitalism is simply accepted as a fact that you cannot do anything about. The only question is, Will you accommodate yourself to it, or will you be dismissed and excluded?”

— Slavoj Žižek

18. “Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.”

— Slavoj Žižek

19. “Atheism is not the denial of the existence of God, but having doubts as to whether God is conscious.”

— Slavoj Žižek

20. “My big fear is that if I act the way I am, people will notice that there is nothing to see. So I have to be active all the time, covering up.”

— Slavoj Žižek

21. “But in a radically atheist universe, you are not only responsible for doing your duty, You are also responsible for deciding what is your duty.”

— Slavoj Žižek

22. “Who dares to strike today, when having the security of a permanent job is itself becoming a privilege?”

— Slavoj Žižek

23. “Ideology today is unfreedom which you sincerely personally experience as freedom.”

— Slavoj Žižek

24. “The ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.”

— Slavoj Žižek

25. “It’s bad if we are controlled, but if we’re not, it can be even worse.”

— Slavoj Žižek

26. “Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana.”

— Slavoj Žižek

27. “What we philosophers can do is just correct the questions.”

— Slavoj Žižek

28. “As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.”

— Slavoj Žižek

29. “When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.”

— Slavoj Žižek

30. “As a Marxist, let me add: if anyone tells you Lacan is difficult, this is class propaganda by the enemy.”

— Slavoj Žižek

31. “A typical guy who buys organic food doesn’t really buy it in order to be healthy; he buys it to regain a kind of solidarity as the one who really cares about nature. He buys a certain ideological stance.”

— Slavoj Žižek

32. “I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.”

— Slavoj Žižek

33. “Why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than as problems of inequality, exploitation, or injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, rather than emancipation, political struggle, or even armed struggle?”

— Slavoj Žižek

34. “I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born – but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it.”

— Slavoj Žižek

Featured in: Luck Quotes

35. “It is more satisfying to sacrifice oneself for the poor victim than to enable the other to overcome their victim status and perhaps become even more succesfull than ourselves.”

— Slavoj Žižek

36. “What if culture itself is nothing but a halt, a break, a respite, in the pursuit of barbarity?”

— Slavoj Žižek

37. “Postcolonialism is the invention of some rich guys from India who saw that they could make a good career in top Western universities by playing on the guilt of white liberals.”

— Slavoj Žižek

38. “The minimum necessary structuring ingredient of every ideology is to distance itself from another ideology, to denounce its other as ideology.”

— Slavoj Žižek

39. “Come on. I don’t have any problem violating my own insights in practice.”

— Slavoj Žižek

40. “Our biological body itself is a form of hardware that needs re-programming through tantra like a new spiritual software which can release or unblock its potential.”

— Slavoj Žižek

41. “We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom- war on terror and so on-falsifies freedom.”

— Slavoj Žižek

42. “True universalists are not those who preach global tolerance of differences and all-encompassing unity, but those who engage in a passionate struggle for the assertion of the Truth which compels them.”

— Slavoj Žižek

43. “In order effectively to liberate oneself from the grip of existing social reality, one should first renounce the transgressive fantasmatic supplement that attaches us to it.”

— Slavoj Žižek

44. “The problem for me is not that Schwarzenegger is governor, but the extent to which even politicians who are not actors are functioning like actors.”

— Slavoj Žižek

45. “For the multiculturalist, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are prohibited, Italians and Irish get a little respect, blacks are good, native Americans are even better. The further away we go, the more they deserve respect. This is a kind of inverted, patronising respect that puts everyone at a distance.”

— Slavoj Žižek

46. “The more opera is dead, the more it flourishes.”

— Slavoj Žižek

47. “Liberal democracy – as you know, in the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today’s left effectively offers global capitalism with a human face, more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not.”

— Slavoj Žižek

48. “The duty of a politician for me is to be a representative: a politician is not an expert, experts are experts, hired for their expertise.”

— Slavoj Žižek

49. “In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being.”

— Slavoj Žižek

50. “My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions.”

— Slavoj Žižek