Quotes from Raoul Vaneigem

We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.

Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.

In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption.

Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out.

Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.

People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure, but of the use to which they are

The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself.

The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.

The world of the commodity is a world updside-down, which bases itself not upon life but upon the transformation of life into work.

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth

The millions of human beings who were shot, tortured, starved, treated like animals and made the object of a conspiracy of ridicule, can sleep in peace in their communal graves, for at least the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to believe, on the strength of their daily dose of television, that they are happy and free. The Communards went down, fighting to the last, so that you too could qualify for a Caribbean cruise.

Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?

Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.

Daydreaming subverts the world.

The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.

To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.

Suffering is the pain of constraints. An atom of pure delight, no matter how small, can hold it at bay.

My creativity, no matter how poor, is for me a far better guide than all the knowledge with which my head has been crammed. In the night of Power, its glimmer keeps the enemy forces at bay.

It is much more a lack of fun which batters us than over abundance and indulgence

God cannot know anything, will anything or do anything without me. With God I created myself, I created all things, and my hand holds up heaven, earth and all the creatures of the earth. Without me there is nothing.

No more Guernicas, no more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin?

Everywhere the same law holds good: 'There is no weapon of your individual will which, once appropriated by others, does not turn against you.' If

Identification with an ethnic or national community, with a religion, ideology, or any abstraction is nothing but a blood-soaked delusion.

Because of its increasing triviality, everyday life has gradually become our central preoccupation