Quotes from Jean Baudrillard

There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.

The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.

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?

It is in love with its limitless horizontality, as New York may be with its verticality.

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.

There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.

You are born modern, you do not become so.

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.

Sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public.

There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each. This is not just a stock of affects or pleasure, but also the possibility of playing double or quits with the share you hold in the other's heart.

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).

Power floats like money, like language, like theory.

It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.

Nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight ahead on a beach, swathed in the sounds of his walkman . . . Primitives, when in despair, would commit suicide by swimming out to sea until they could swim no longer. The jogger commits suicide by running up and down the beach. His eyes are wild, saliva drips from his mouth. Do not stop him.

Forgetting extermination is part of extermination.

Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.

Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.

We need a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin to reassure us as to our ends, since ultimately we have never believed in them.

Hell of simulation, which is no longer one of torture, but of subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning...

I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.

This false distance is present everywhere: in spy films, in Godard, in modern advertising, which uses it continually as a cultural allusion. It is not really clear in the end whether this 'cool' smile is the smile of humour or that of commercial complicity. This is also the case with pop, and its smile ultimately encapsulates all its ambiguity: it is not the smile of critical distance, but the smile of collusion

There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. Appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism. This is where seduction begins.

Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum. Such would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.