Quotes from Raoul Vaneigem

Those whom Power can neither govern nor kill, it taxes with madness.

I refuse to be called by any name, and suddenly, beneath the unnameable, I discover the wealth of lived experience, inexpressible poetry, the preconditions of supersession.

Oppression is no longer centralized, for it is everywhere. The positive aspect of this disintegration is that everyone begins to see, in their state of almost complete isolation, that they must first save themselves, make themselves the centre, and from their own subjectivity build a world where they can be at home anywhere.

O trabalho foi aquilo que o homem achou de melhor para nada fazer da sua vida.

Henceforward, no revolution will be worth the name if it does not at the very least imply the radical elimination of all hierarchy.

Qu'est-ce que le nihilisme ? Rozanov répond parfaitement à la question quand il écrit : "La représentation est terminée. Le public se lève. Il est temps d'enfiler son manteau et de rentrer à la maison. On se retourne : plus de manteau ni de maison.

The feeling of 'having done one's duty' makes everyone into their own honourable executioner.

If I must die, at least let me die as I have occasionally loved.

Let us have no more suicide from weariness, which comes like a final sacrifice crowning all those that have gone before. Better one last laugh à la Cravan, or one last song à la Ravachol.

Those who organize the world organize both suffering and the pain-killers for dealing with it;

To talk of a modern work of art enduring is sillier than talking of the eternal values of Standard Oil.

Whatever you possess possesses you in return.

Any remnants of passionate tension between sexual pleasure and the adventurous quest for it are fast disintegrating into a panting succession of mechanically repeated gestures whose rhythm offers no hope of approaching so much as a semblance of orgasm. The quantitative Eros of speed, rapid change, and love-against-the-clock everywhere disfigures the face of real pleasure.

We live our roles better than our own lives.

Real friends care little for forms.

Pour le pouvoir, l'ennemi numéro UN, c'est la créativité individuelle s'irradiant librement.

Guerrilla war is a total war. This is the path on which the Situationist International is set: calculated harassment on every front—cultural, political, economic, and social. The battlefield is everyday life, which guarantees the unity of the struggle.

Religious beliefs concealed humans from themselves, a Bastille walling them up in a pyramidal world with God at the summit and the king just below. Alas,

The great collective illusions, anaemic from shedding the blood of so many, have since given way to the thousands of prepacked ideologies sold by consumer society like so many portable brain-scrambling machines. Will

The desire to live is a political decision. Who wants a world where the guarantee of freedom from starvation means the risk of death from boredom?

What is certain is that it is sheer madness a century later, when the economy of consumption is absorbing the economy of production and the exploitation of labour power is being subsumed by the exploitation of everyday creativity.

The harder you run after time, the faster time goes: this is the law of the consumable.

The harder you run after time, the faster time goes: this is the law of the consumable. Try to stop it, and it will wear you out and age you all the more easily. Time must be caught on the wing, in the present—but the present has yet to be constructed.

there is something admirable ... to have to coexist ... some thousands of souls for whom even the hope of a last judgment has been taken away.