Quotes from Guy Debord

Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.

There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.

Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.

He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with.

Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.

In our society now, we prefer to see ourselves living than living.

The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.

The advertisements during intermissions are the truest reflection of an intermission from life.

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specialisations that they actually live.

Behind the masks of total choice, different forms of the same alienation confront each other.

All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.

The passions have been sufficiently interpreted; the point now is to discover new ones.

But a lie that can no longer be challenged becomes insane.

Capital is no longer the invisible center governing the production process; as it accumulates, it spreads to the ends of the earth in the form of tangible objects. The entire expanse of society is its portrait.

La réalité du temps a été remplacée par la publicité du temps.

He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with.

As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.

We still have some time to take advantage of the fact that radio and television stations are not yet guarded by the army.

Le tourisme, se ramène fondamentalement au loisir d'aller voir ce qui est devenu banal.

Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this world, of a global social practice split into reality and image. The social practice confronted by an autonomous spectacle is at the same time the real totality which contains that spectacle. But the split within this totality mutilates it to the point that the spectacle seems to be its goal.

the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle's essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life — a negation that has taken on a visible form.

The spectacle is nothing more than the common language of this separation. What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.

Tourism is the chance to go and see what has been made trite… the same modernization that has deprived travel of its temporal aspect has likewise deprived it of the reality of space.