Jean Baudrillard Quotes

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.

The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body.

Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.

Art does not die because there is no more art. It dies because there is too much.

Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.

Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.

What I am, I don't know. I am the simulacrum of myself.

There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.

History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history.

Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true .

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

Philosophy leads to death, sociology leads to suicide.

When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.

It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.

[I]nside every computer, there is a hidden man being bored.

Every woman is like a time-zone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night.

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

Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.

The only thing worse than being bored is being boring.

Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.

Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.

If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.

The surprises of thought are like those of love: they wear out. But here too you can carry on for a long time doing your conjugal duty.

In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

One of the pleasures of travel is to dive into places where others are compelled to live and come out unscathed, full of the malicious pleasure of abandoning them to their fate.

The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance, but deceit and fraud.

There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.

The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.

We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.

All societies end up wearing masks.

It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us unintelligibly, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.

The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning.

Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.

Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don't even arise.

The new shopping malls make possible the synthesis of all consumer activities, not least of which are shopping, flirting with objects, idle wandering, and all the permutations of these.

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.

Challenge, and not desire, lies at the heart of seduction.

You are born modern, you do not become so.

All of [the] activities here have a surreptitious end-of-the-world feel to them:... these joggers sleepwalking in the mist like shadow's who have escaped from Plato's cave

Sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public.

Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.

Information...exhausts itself in the staging of meaning...[and leads] not at all to a surfeit of innovation but to the very contrary, to total entropy

The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.

What is a society without a heroic dimension?