“Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.”
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
“... just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.”
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
“Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea. ”
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
“In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false. ”
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
“I have written much less than most people who write; I have drunk much more than most people who drink.”
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
“The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive… compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.”
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
“Revolution is not 'showing' life to people, but making them live. A revolutionary organization must always remember that its objective is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation.”
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
“Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity”
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
“The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender “lonely crowds.”
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
“This society eliminates geographical distance only to produce a new internal separation.”
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
“The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative.”
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
“The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on this one point, however, because this officially nonexistent bureaucracy simultaneously attributes the crowning achievements of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its existence is everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy must be invisible as a class. As a result, all social life becomes insane.”
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
“The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.”
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
"He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with."
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
"Work is only justified by leisure time. To admit the emptiness of leisure time is to admit the impossibility of life."
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
"Behind the masks of total choice, different forms of the same alienation confront each other."
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
"An organization must always remember that its objective is not getting people to listen to speeches by experts, but getting them to speak for themselves."
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
"Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state's monopoly of armed violence."
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
"What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic. And what is genuine is reconstructed as quickly as possible, to resemble the false."
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
"No longer is science asked to understand the world, or to improve any part of it. It is asked instead to immediately justify everything that happens....spectacular domination has cut down the vast tree of scientific knowledge in order to make itself a truncheon."
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
"The Sage of Toronto ... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a "global village" instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle's present vulgarity."
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
"Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it"
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
"t is hardly surprising that children should enthusiastically start their education at an early age with the Absolute Knowledge of computer science; while they are unable to read, for reading demands making judgments at every line. Conversation is almost dead, and soon so too will be those who knew how to speak."
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
"With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning."
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)
"There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter."
― Guy Debord (1931-1994)