“The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.”

The world is not dialectical – it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.

The order of the world is always right – such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin.

The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction.

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.

Perhaps the world’s second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.

Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.

There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each.

When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?

Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved – commitment to a scenario.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.

Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.

Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.

What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.

In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.

At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.