Quotes from Guy Debord

Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle's estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual's gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.

Never work.

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

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.

Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity

The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender "lonely crowds.

I have written much less than most people who write; I have drunk much more than most people who drink.

The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.

This society eliminates geographical distance only to produce a new internal separation.

In a world that has REALLY been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.

The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive… compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.

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

The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.

The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative.

Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.

The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.

Pour savoir écrire, il faut avoir lu, et pour savoir lire, il faut savoir vivre

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.

capitalism could appropriate even the most radical ideas and return them safely in the form of harmless ideologies.