Quotes from Raoul Vaneigem

Hope is the leash of submission.

What could I wish for the present but to take the greatest pleasure in being what I am?

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.

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.

Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.

I do not dream of a gentle revolution. My passion runs to the violence of supersession, the ferocity of a life that renounces nothing.

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.

As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.

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

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power.

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.

There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies.

Ideally a book would have no order in it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

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

People are bewitched into believing that time slips away, and this belief is the basis of time actually slipping away.

The key is within each of us. No instructions come with it.

It is entirely up to us to invent our own lives.

In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life.

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

Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume; the hellish cycle is complete.

The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life.

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

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.