Quotes from Jean Baudrillard

The condemnation of sects is, like any witch-hunt, disgraceful: 'mental deficiency', 'cult of the guru', 'suicidal drive' etc. As though all these things were not standard in the normal sphere of conventions and the social order. This is reminiscent of the charge of 'cowardice' made against suicides.

The perfect criminal is the one who lays claim to the crime he has not committed. Who conceals his innocence behind the mask of crime. He is much harder to unmask.

The simulacrum is never what hides the truth - it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true. -Ecclesiastes

What is deeply ingrained within us is this possibility of expecting everything from someone at each new meeting. In our own minds, we are all virgins and hope, against all good sense, to find a destiny in any face that comes along.

It is like truth according to Nietzsche: we no longer believe that the truth is true when all its veils have been removed. Similarly, we do not believe that war is war when all uncertainty is supposedly removed and it appears as a naked operation. The nudity of war is no less virtual than that of the erotic body in the apparatus of striptease.

Tautology, being the most vulgar logical expression, is always the strongest argument.

Stalin's double. Since he wasn't a perfect likeness, they touched him up using plastic surgery, after which they eliminated all his relatives and all the witnesses to the operation. He played his role so well that in the end he came to think he was Stalin (as did Stalin himself!). At that point they sent him to the Gulag. But so well did he identify with his role that, on learning of Stalin's death, he died three days later.

It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.

En último término, el objeto y el sujeto son lo mismo.

Because it is with this same imperialism that present-day simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation.

The traces of the dinosaurs howl in our memories. Had they been alive we would have exterminated them, but we respect their traces. It is the same with the human race: the more we imperil it, the more meticulously we preserve its remains.

Her geçen gün daha çok haber ve bilgiye kar??n giderek daha az anlam?n üretildiÄŸi bir evrende ya??yoruz.

Here lies the total abstraction and the source of all domination: in the breakdown of the dual relation. The strategy of domination is, indeed, to ensure that, through all the techniques of communication, through inescapable, streaming information, there can no longer be any response. It is a domination by signs empty of meaning. But, on the other side, there is an equal indifference and blank resistance.

To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have.

All that is singular and irreducible must be reduced and absorbed. This is the law of democracy and the New World Order. In this sense, the Iran-Iraq war was a successful first phase: Iraq served to liquidate the most radical form of the anti-Western challenge, even though it never defeated it.

The proof of how poorly grounded freedom is is that depriving someone of their freedom itself no longer means anything. Impossible to find an equivalence between the crime and the punishment or, therefore, any possible 'justice'. Given the extension of responsibility and its ramification into all networks, the irresponsibility is the same everywhere.

The day the world ends, no one will be there, just as no one was there when it began. This is a scandal. Such a scandal for the human race that it is indeed capable collectively, out of spite, of hastening the end of the world by all possible means just so it can enjoy the show.

One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms (Littré).

simulation threatens the difference between the true and the false, the real and the imaginary.

Radicality is an end-of-career privilege.

As a result. the more the hegemony of the global consensus is reinforced. the greater the risk, or the chances, of its collapse.

In days gone by, we were afraid of dying in dishonour or a state of sin. Nowadays, we are afraid of dying fools. Now the fact is that there is no Extreme Unction to absolve us of foolishness. We endure it here on earth as subjective eternity.

One who lets others believe is always superior to one who believes, or makes others believe.

We discovered primitive societies, America, the atom, the unconscious, viruses. But the consequences of this expansion of the field of knowledge escape us. We believe we discovered these things innocently in the peaceful realm of science. But they, too, discovered us and have broken in on our world - just deserts for our breaking in on theirs.