Raoul Vaneigem Quotes

41 quotes in 652 categories

• Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to…
• The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself.
• People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that…
• As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.
• Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out.
• Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume; the hellish cycle is complete.
• In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of…
• Production and consumption are the nipples of modern society. Thus suckled, humanity grows in strength and beauty; rising standard of living, all modern conveniences, distractions…
• Suffering is the pain of constraints. An atom of pure delight, no matter how small, can hold it at bay.
• Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a…
• In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption.
• We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our…
• The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life.
• To work for delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable from preparing for a general insurrection
• The history of our times calls to mind those Walt Disney characters who rush madly over the edge of a cliff without seeing it, so…
• Where constraint breaks people, and mediation makes fools of them, the seduction of power is what makes them love their oppression. Because of it, people…
• The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us…
• Privative appropriation and domination are thus originally imposed and felt as a positive right, but in the form of a negative universality. Valid for everyone,…
• I do not dream of a gentle revolution. My passion runs to the violence of supersession, the ferocity of a life that renounces nothing.
• Hope is the leash of submission.

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