Quotes from Jean Baudrillard

Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.

Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory. Men have only had an unconscious since they lost a territory.

What is man if the signs that predate him have such power? A human race has to invent sacrifices equal to the natural cataclysmic order that surrounds it.

Philosophy leads to death, sociology leads to suicide.

It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.

The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.

In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.

The order of the world is always right - such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin.

Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world. This is as marvelous as being there in the beginning.

Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved - commitment to a scenario.

Smile and others will smile back.

Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.

History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history.

Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

The world is not dialectical - it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.

Power is only too happy to make football bear a diabolical responsibility for stupefying the masses.

Take your desires for reality!" can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power.

Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future.

The obese is in a total delirium. For he is not only large, of a size opposed to normal morphology: he is larger than large. He no longer makes sense in some distinctive opposition, but in his excess, his redundancy.

The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.

Terrorism, like viruses, is everywhere. There is a global perfusion of terrorism, which accompanies any system of domination as though it were its shadow, ready to activate itself anywhere, like a double agent.

The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning.

There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.