Slavoj Žižek Quotes

38 quotes in 880 categories

• We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are…
• My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional…
• I believe in clear-cut positions. I think that the most arrogant position is this apparent, multidisciplinary modesty of "what I am saying now is not…
• I am what you might call abstractly anti-capitalist. For instance, I am suspicious of the old leftists who focus all their hatred on the United…
• When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.
• On the information sheet in a New York hotel, I recently read: 'Dear guest! To guarantee that you will fully enjoy your stay with us,…
• For the multiculturalist, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are prohibited, Italians and Irish get a little respect, blacks are good, native Americans are even better. The further…
• We Slovenians are even better misers than you Scottish. You know how Scotland began? One of us Slovenians was spending too much money, so we…
• Come on. I don't have any problem violating my own insights in practice.
• Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence - by naming a thing, we treat it as…
• True universalists are not those who preach global tolerance of differences and all-encompassing unity, but those who engage in a passionate struggle for the assertion…
• The same rightists who decades ago were shouting, 'Better dead than red!' are now often heard mumbling, 'Better red than eating hamburgers.
• Our biological body itself is a form of hardware that needs re-programming through tantra like a new spiritual software which can release or unblock its…
• Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.
• The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.
• The true ethical test is not only the readiness to save the victims, but also - even more, perhaps - the ruthless dedication to annihilating…
• The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland—a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth—can bring to…
• Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.
• If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.
• The liberal idea of tolerance is more and more a kind of intolerance. What it means is 'Leave me alone; don't harass me; I'm intolerant…

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