Jean Baudrillard
A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.Collection: Jealousy
The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.Collection: Sad
Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.Collection: Dreams
To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.Collection: Future
There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.Collection: Funny
Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.Collection: Courage
What is a society without a heroic dimension?Collection: Society
Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.Collection: Fear
There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.
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 very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.
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.
It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.
The world is not dialectical - it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.
Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.
We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.
The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.
The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.
Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.
Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.
At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.
There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each. This is not just a stock of affects or pleasure, but also the possibility of playing double or quits with the share you hold in the other's heart.
What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.
You are born modern, you do not become so.
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.
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.
Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.
I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?
It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.
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.
The order of the world is always right - such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin.
There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.
Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved - commitment to a scenario.
We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.Collection: World
Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.Collection: Real
Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.Collection: Quality
The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance, but deceit and fraud.Collection: Ignorance
What I am, I don't know. I am the simulacrum of myself.Collection: Simulacrum
All societies end up wearing masks.Collection: Wearing A Mask
Art does not die because there is no more art. It dies because there is too much.Collection: Art
Welcome to the Desert of the Real.Collection: Real
Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.Collection: Real
Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world. This is as marvelous as being there in the beginning.Collection: Generations
Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.Collection: Photography
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.Collection: Simulacrum
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.Collection: Smile
When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.Collection: Real
A successful object is one which exists beyond its own reality, which creates a dual (and not merely interactlve) relation (with its users also), a relation of contradiction, misappropriation and destablilisation.Collection: Successful
Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.Collection: Mirrors