Quotes from Jean Baudrillard

All of [the] activities here have a surreptitious end-of-the-world feel to them:... these joggers sleepwalking in the mist like shadow's who have escaped from Plato's cave

Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.

Everyone seeks their look. Since it is no longer possible to base any claim on one's own existence, there is nothing for it but to perform an appearing act without concerning oneself with being - or even with being seen. So it is not: I exist, I am here! but rather: I am visible, I am an image -look! look! This is not even narcissism, merely an extraversion without depth, a sort of self-promot­ing ingenuousness whereby everyone becomes the manager of their own appearance.

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.

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

The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory.

It is from the death of the social that socialism will emerge, as it is from the death of God that religions emerge.

Today...no performance can be without its control screen video...its goal is to be hooked up to itself...the mirror phase has given way to the video phase. What develops around the video or stereo culture is not a narcissistic imaginary, but an effect of frantic self-referentiality, a short-circuit which immediately hooks up like with like, and, in doing so, emphasizes their surface intensity and deeper meaninglessness.

The old slogan 'truth is stranger than fiction,' that still corresponded to the surrealist phase of this estheticization of life, is obsolete. There is no more fiction that life could possibly confront, even victoriously-it is reality itself that disappears utterly in the game of reality-radical disenchantment, the cool and cybernetic phase following the hot stage of fantasy.

It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable.

Every woman is like a time-zone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night.

To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending

Art does not die because there is no more art; it dies because there is too much.

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

The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject the real and the referential everywhere, to persuade us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production.

The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.

At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance.

Even the Middle Ages, which condemned and punished animals in due form, was in this way much closer to them than we are. They held them to be guilty: which was a way of honoring them. We take them for nothing, and it is on this basis that we are human with them.

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

Pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the true and the false, the real and the imaginary.

When everything is social, suddenly nothing is.

Mass(age) is the message.

If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then 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.