Guy Debord > Quotes

“Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.”
― Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

“Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Never work.”
― Guy Debord

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”
― Guy Debord

“Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea. ”
― Guy Debord

“I have written much less than most people who write; I have drunk much more than most people who drink.”
― Guy Debord

“The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender “lonely crowds.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“This society eliminates geographical distance only to produce a new internal separation.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“In a world that has REALLY been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood. ”
― Guy Debord

“The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive… compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.”
― Guy Debord

“The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.”
― Guy Debord

“Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.”
― Guy Debord, Society Of The Spectacle

“The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having — human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing — all “having” must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances. At the same time all individual reality has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is directly dependent on them. Individual reality is allowed to appear only if it is not actually real.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.”
― Guy Debord

“Pour savoir écrire, il faut avoir lu, et pour savoir lire, il faut savoir vivre ”
― Guy Debord

“None of the activity stolen by work can be regained by submitting to what work has produced. - The Society of The Spectacle”
― Guy Debord

“capitalism could appropriate even the most radical ideas and return them safely in the form of harmless ideologies.”
― Guy Debord, Society Of The Spectacle

“The society whose modernisation has reached the stage of integrated spectacle
is characterised by the combined effect of five principal factors: incessant technological renewal, integration of state and economy, generalised secrecy, unanswerable lies, and eternal present . . .
— The Society of the Spectacle”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on this one point, however, because this officially nonexistent bureaucracy simultaneously attributes the crowning achievements of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its existence is everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy must be invisible as a class. As a result, all social life becomes insane.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Economic growth has liberated societies from the natural pressures that forced them into an immediate struggle for survival; but they have not yet been liberated from their liberator. The commodity’s independence has spread to the entire economy it now dominates. This economy has transformed the world, but it has merely transformed it into a world dominated by the economy.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“The more you consume the less you live,”
― Guy Debord, Society Of The Spectacle