IO > IO's Quotes

“We need a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin to reassure us as to our ends, since ultimately we have never believed in them.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (Semiotext

“The old slogan 'truth is stranger than fiction,' that still corresponded to the surrealist phase of this estheticization of life, is obsolete. There is no more fiction that life could possibly confront, even victoriously-it is reality itself that disappears utterly in the game of reality-radical disenchantment, the cool and cybernetic phase following the hot stage of fantasy.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (Semiotext

“And so art is everywhere, since artifice is at the very heart of reality. And so art is dead, not only because its critical transcendence is gone, but because reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image. Reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality. It no longer even surpasses fiction: it captures every dream even before it takes on the appearance of a dream.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (Semiotext

“The vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances, and the world consists chiefly of the vulgar.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“The hyperreal is the abolition of the real not by violent destruction, but by its assumption, elevation to the strength of the model. Anticipation, deterrence, preventive transfiguration, etc.: the model acts as a sphere of absorption of the real.”
― Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities

“Mass(age) is the message.”
― Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities

“The strategy of power has long seemed founded on the apathy of the masses. The more passive they were, the more secure it was. But this logic is only characteristic of the bureaucratic and centralist phase of power. And it is this which today turns against it: the inertia it has fostered becomes the sign of its death.”
― Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities

“Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile.”
― Jean Baudrillard

“If I were to give a summary of the tendency of our times, I would say, Quantity. The multitude, the mass spirit, dominates everywhere, destroying quality. Our entire life — production, politics, and education — rests on quantity, on numbers. The worker who once took pride in the thoroughness and quality of his work, has been replaced by brainless, incompetent automatons, who turn out enormous quantities of things, valueless to themselves, and generally injurious to the rest of mankind. Thus quantity, instead of adding to life’s comforts and peace, has merely increased man’s burden.”
― Emma Goldmann, Anarchism and Other Essays

“Strange people. The kind that leave the merest blur behind them, soon vanished. Hutte and I often used to talk about these traceless beings. They spring up out of nothing one fine day and return there, having sparkled a little. Beauty queens. Gigolos. Butterflies. Most of them, even when alive, had no more substance than steam which will never condense.”
― Patrick Modiano, Missing Person

“The letters dance before my eyes. Who am I?”
― Patrick Modiano, Rue des Boutiques Obscures

“Hutte was always saying that, in the end, we are all "beach men" and that "the sand"--I am quoting his own words-- keeps the traces of our footsteps only a few moment”
― Patrick Modiano, Rue des Boutiques Obscures

“A thing which has lost its idea is like the man who has lost his shadow, and it must either fall under the sway of madness or perish.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“For everything that has not successfully transcended itself can only fall prey to revivals without end.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Silence is banished from our screens; it has no place in communication. Media images (and media texts resemble media images in every way) never fall silent: images and messages must follow one upon the other without interruption. But silence is exactly that - a blip in the circuitry, that minor catastrophe, that slip which, on television for instance, becomes
highly meaningful - a break laden now with anxiety, now with jubilation, which confirms the fact that all this communication is basically nothing but a rigid script, an uninterrupted fiction designed to free us not only from the void of the television screen but equally from the void of our own mental screen, whose images we wait on with the same fascination.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Everyone seeks their look. Since it is no longer possible to base any claim on one's own existence, there is nothing for it but to perform an appearing act without concerning oneself with being - or even with being seen. So it is not: I exist, I am here! but rather: I am visible, I am an image -look! look! This is not even narcissism, merely an extraversion without depth, a sort of self-promot­ing ingenuousness whereby everyone becomes the manager of their own appearance.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Something escapes us, and we are escaping from ourselves, or losing ourselves, as part of an irreversible process; we have now passed some point of no return, the point where the contradictoriness of things ended, and we find ourselves, still alive, in a universe of non-contradiction, of enthusiasm, of ecstasy - of stupor in the face of a process which, for all its irreversibility, is bereft of meaning.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena