The Revolution of Everyday Life Quotes

“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, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Daydreaming subverts the world.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Purchasing power is a license to purchase power. The old proletariat sold its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time it had was passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Suffering is the pain of constraints. An atom of pure delight, no matter how small, can hold it at bay.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“What drives us to despair is not the immensity of our unsatisfied desires, but the moment when our fledgling passion discovers its own emptiness. Insatiable desire for passionate knowledge of one pretty girl after another stems from anxiety and from fear of love, so afraid are we of never encountering anything but objects. The dawn when lovers leave each other's arms is the same dawn that breaks on the execution of revolutionaries without a revolution. Isolation a deux cannot prevail over the isolation of all. Pleasure is broken off prematurely and lovers find themselves naked in the world, their actions suddenly ridiculous and feeble. No love is possible in an unhappy world.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“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, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“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, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“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, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“If I must die, at least let me die as I have occasionally loved.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“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, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Those whom Power can neither govern nor kill, it taxes with madness.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“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, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Because of its increasing triviality, everyday life has gradually become our central preoccupation”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Identification with an ethnic or national community, with a religion, ideology, or any abstraction is nothing but a blood-soaked delusion.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Let us have no more suicide from weariness, which comes like a final sacrifice crowning all those that have gone before. Better one last laugh à la Cravan, or one last song à la Ravachol.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“The feeling of ‘having done one’s duty’ makes everyone into their own honourable executioner.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“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, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“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, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“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, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Whatever you possess possesses you in return.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Those who organize the world organize both suffering and the pain-killers for dealing with it;”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Real friends care little for forms.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“We live our roles better than our own lives.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Qu’est-ce que le nihilisme ? Rozanov répond parfaitement à la question quand il écrit : “La représentation est terminée. Le public se lève. Il est temps d’enfiler son manteau et de rentrer à la maison. On se retourne : plus de manteau ni de maison.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations

“Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume, the hellish cycle is complete.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“...the economy cannot stop making us consume more and more, and to consume without respite is to change illusions at an accelerating pace which gradually dissolves the illusion of change. We find ourselves alone, unchanged, frozen in the empty space behind the waterfall of gadgets, family cars and paperbacks.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Guerrilla war is a total war. This is the path on which the Situationist International is set: calculated harassment on every front—cultural, political, economic, and social. The battlefield is everyday life, which guarantees the unity of the struggle.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Pour le pouvoir, l’ennemi numéro UN, c’est la créativité individuelle s’irradiant librement.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“In an industrial society that conflates work and productivity, the need to produce has always stood opposed to the desire to create. What spark of humanity, which is to say possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged from sleep at six every morning, jolted about in commuter trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by speed-up and meaningless gestures and production quotas, and tossed out at the end of the day into great railway-station halls—temples of arrival and departure for the hell of weekdays and the nugatory paradise of the weekend, where the masses commune in brutish weariness?”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life