Quotes from Paul Virilio

Today, almost all-current technologies put the speed of light to work.

There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We'll dream of being blind.

The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck

There are no pessimists; there are only realists and liars.

The contemporary sedentary is someone who feels at home everywhere, thanks to cellphones, and the nomad is someone who does not feel at home anywhere, someone who is excluded, ostracized.

An old Japanese friend recently confided to me: ' I can't forgive to americans for the fact that Hiroshima wasn't an act of war, but an experiment'.

Since there was no longer a horizon towards which to rush, they would invent fake ones - substitute horizons.

How can we ultimately fail to twig that the apparent impiety of contemporary art is only ever the inverted image of sacred art, the reversal of the creator's initial question: why is there something instead of nothing?

By the way, who invented Peace?

Speed now illuminates reality whereas light once gave objects of the world their shape.

The true hero of the American utopia is neither the cowboy nor the soldier, but the pioneer, the pathfinder, the person who 'takes his body, where his eyes have been'.

Il faut penser à ce qui arrive - nous sommes les producteurs de l'avenir.

It is, in fact, impossible clearly to distinguish economic war from information war, since each involves the same hegemonic ambition of making commercial and military exchanges interactive

The fear of exposing one's private life gives way to the desire to over-expose it to every one.

The reconciliation of nothing and reality and the suspension of time and space by high velocities replace the exoticism of journeys with a vast expanse of emptiness.

Bombe atomique hier, bombe informatique aujourd'hui et, demain, bombe génétique?

When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.

The achievement of star status itself would seem to be based not on talent or good looks any more, but on the risks taken for the camera by a whole host of stuntmen brought in from the fairgrounds and circuses: trick riding, controlled falls, suspended accidents and suicidal exploits, leading, with the coming of 'live' transmission, to the 'confessional' TV programme, to the so-called reality show, which shades over, at the edges, into the snuff movie.

Si inventer la substance, c'est indirectement inventer l'accident, plus l'invention est puissant, performante, et plus l'accident est dramatique.

Art used to be painting, sculpture, music, etc, but now, all technology has become art. Of course, this form of art is still very primitive, but it is slowly replacing reality.

Art is drama. Any relationship to art is also a relationship to death.

Now all we have to do to enter the realm of art is to take a car.

I am very interested in and that is what Sun Tzu in his ancient Chinese text calls The Art of War.

The cinema was certainly an art, but television can't be, because it is the museum of accidents. In other words, its art is to be the site where all accidents happen. But that's its only art.