Quotes from Jean Baudrillard

The fury to unveil the truth, to get at the naked truth, the one which haunts all discourses of interpretation, the obscene rage to uncover the secret, is proportionate to the impossibility of ever achieving this.

Everywhere there is pleasure you will find a woman in disguise.

But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum ... an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.

There is a pact of pride in a couple's love, a pact of glory, which is at least as fundamental as sexual feelings. These latter peter out silently in the two bodies, but the pact can only be broken by the spoken word.

There are cultures that can only picture their origins and not their ends.

It is not enough for theory to describe and analyse, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality.

Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile... Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.

If he is this good at acting crazy, it's because he is.

Reality itself is too obvious to be true.

If it has been possible to suggest that no event could have a final meaning before history had come to an end one way or another, then any way of giving any kind of sense to an event is a way of putting an end to history.

All we have left of liberty is an ad-man's illusion.

When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.

The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.

We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and smug in "the social," our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.

Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.

I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?

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.

To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.

We are already more or less disconnected from our history and thus also from its destination. That means, then, that time can slow as it nears its end and that the year 2000, in a certain way, will not take place.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.

A society which allows an abominable event to burgeon from its dung heap and grow on its surface is like a man who lets a fly crawl unheeded across his face or saliva dribble from his mouth -- either epileptic or dead.

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.

Man has lost the basic skill of the ape, the ability to scratch its back. Which gave it extraordinary independence, and the liberty to associate for reasons other than the need for mutual back-scratching.