“You are born modern, you do not become so.”

What is a society without a heroic dimension?

The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.

There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.

To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.

The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today.

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.

Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.

We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.

I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again.

It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia.

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.