Quotes by Jean Baudrillard

“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 ...”

“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.”

“Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays cosily tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from ...”

“The media represents world that is more real than reality that we can experience. People lose the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. They also begin to engage with the fantasy with...”

“Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.”

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

“Why did this [Vietnam] war, so hard, so long, so ferocious, vanish from one day to the next as if by magic?Why did this American defeat (the largest reversal in the history of the USA) have no inte...”

“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 econom...”

“But this aura of an artificial menace was still necessary to conceal that they [Presidents] were no longer anything but the mannequins of power. Formerly, the king (also the god) had to die, therei...”

“But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme power that is simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or ...”

“We find the same situation in the economy. On the one hand, the battered remnants of production and the real economy; on the other, the circulation of gigantic amounts of virtual capital. But the t...”

“it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).”

“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.”

“What one exorcises in this [imagery] way at little cost, and for the price of a few tears, will never in effect be reproduced”

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

“it is with this same imperialism that present-day simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation.”

“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 mod...”

“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, g...”

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

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