Quotes from Slavoj Zizek

You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.

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 put him on a boat and he landed in Scotland.

If you have reasons to love someone, you don't love them.

Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana.

Ideology is a certain unique experience of the universe and your place in it, to put it in standard terms, which serves the production of the existing power relations and blah blah blah.

The ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.

Atheism is not the denial of the existence of God, but having doubts as to whether God is conscious.

The horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things -- they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.

Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.

Experts are by definition the servants of those in power: they don't really THINK, they just apply their knowledge to problems defined by the powerful.

The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.

What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I'm a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets - it's a very sad lesson - by their intervention, saved the myth.

Probably never in human history did we live in a society in which, at the microlevel of personal behavior, our lives were so strongly regulated.

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 potential.

Communism will win.

I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.

Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.

Liberal democracy - as you know, in the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today's left effectively offers global capitalism with a human face, more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not.

Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.

When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.

You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.

What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I'm a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets - it's a very sad lesson - by their intervention, saved the myth.

I - and I still consider myself, I'm sorry to tell you, a Marxist and a Communist, but I couldn't help noticing how all the best Marxist analyses are always analyses of a failure.

Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.