“Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“... 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, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“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, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“The status of celebrity offers the promise of being showered with ‘all good things’ that capitalism has to offer. The grotesque display of celebrity lives (and deaths) is the contemporary form of the cult of personality; those ‘famous for being famous’ hold out the spectacular promise of the complete erosion of a autonomously lived life in return for an apotheosis as an image. The ideological function of celebrity (and lottery systems) is clear - like a modern ‘wheel of fortune’ the message is ‘all is luck; some are rich, some are poor, that is the way the world is...it could be you!”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“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, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“This society eliminates geographical distance only to produce a new internal separation.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“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, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“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, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“The society whose modernisation has reached the stage of integrated spectacle
is characterised by the combined effect of five principal factors: incessant technological renewal, integration of state and economy, generalised secrecy, unanswerable lies, and eternal present . . .
— The Society of the Spectacle”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“La réalité du temps a été remplacée par la publicité du temps.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“Capital is no longer the invisible center governing the production process; as it accumulates, it spreads to the ends of the earth in the form of tangible objects. The entire expanse of society is its portrait.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“Le tourisme, se ramène fondamentalement au loisir d'aller voir ce qui est devenu banal.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this world, of a global social practice split into reality and image. The social practice confronted by an autonomous spectacle is at the same time the real totality which contains that spectacle. But the split within this totality mutilates it to the point that the spectacle seems to be its goal.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“Every given commodity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge the others, and attempts to impose itself everywhere as if it were the only one. The spectacle, then is the epic poem of this struggle, an epic which cannot be concluded by the fall of any Troy. The spectacle does not sign the praises of men and their weapons, but of commodities and their passions. In this blind struggle every commodity, pursuing its passion, unconsciously realizes something higher: the becoming-world of the commodity, which is also the becoming-commodity of the world. Thus, by means of a ruse of commodity logic, what's specific in the commodity wears itself out in the fight while the commodity-form moves toward its absolute realization.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“The spectacle is nothing more than the common language of this separation. What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having — human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing — all “having” must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances. At the same time all individual reality has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is directly dependent on them. Individual reality is allowed to appear only if it is not actually real.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“But a lie that can no longer be challenged becomes insane.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“Economic growth has liberated societies from the natural pressures that forced them into an immediate struggle for survival; but they have not yet been liberated from their liberator. The commodity’s independence has spread to the entire economy it now dominates. This economy has transformed the world, but it has merely transformed it into a world dominated by the economy.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“Whereas during the primitive stage of capitalist accumulation “political economy considers the proletarian only as a worker,” who only needs to be allotted the indispensable minimum for maintaining his labor power, and never considers him “in his leisure and humanity,” this ruling-class perspective is revised as soon as commodity abundance reaches a level that requires an additional collaboration from him. Once his workday is over, the worker is suddenly redeemed from the total contempt toward him that is so clearly implied by every aspect of the organization and surveillance of production, and finds himself seemingly treated like a grownup, with a great show of politeness, in his new role as a consumer.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
“Partout où il y a représentation indépendante, le spectacle se reconstitue.”
― Guy Debord, quote from The Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord
Born place: in Paris, France
Born date December 28, 1931
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“It was easy to be good and kind in times of plenty. The trying times were the moments that defined a man.
And love? Love was something that did much to change a person. It brought joy as it brought suffering, and in turn brought about those moments that defined one’s character. Love gave life to the lifeless. It was the greatest of all living powers.
But, as with all things, love had a dark side to it.”
― Renee Ahdieh, quote from The Rose & the Dagger
“A Great Rabbi stands, teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death.
There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine - a Speaker for the Dead - has told me of two other Rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you.
The Rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. 'Is there any man here,' he says to them, 'who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?'
They murmur and say, 'We all know the desire, but Rabbi none of us has acted on it.'
The Rabbi says, 'Then kneel down and give thanks that God has made you strong.' He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, 'Tell the Lord Magistrate who saved his mistress, then he'll know I am his loyal servant.'
So the woman lives because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.
Another Rabbi. Another city. He goes to her and stops the mob as in the other story and says, 'Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.'
The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. ‘Someday,’ they think, ‘I may be like this woman. And I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her as I wish to be treated.’
As they opened their hands and let their stones fall to the ground, the Rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head and throws it straight down with all his might it crushes her skull and dashes her brain among the cobblestones. ‘Nor am I without sins,’ he says to the people, ‘but if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead – and our city with it.’
So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.
The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis and when they veer too far they die. Only one Rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation.
So of course, we killed him.
-San Angelo
Letters to an Incipient Heretic”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from La voz de los muertos
“Home is not a place, Not a smell, Not a face, But a space In your heart.”
― Staci Hart, quote from A Thousand Letters
“He hesitates, then says, "You don't think Otter... gets offended by what I say?" He begins to speak faster. "I mean, I don't care who Otter sleeps with. I don't care that he's a fa- gay. I don't care that he's gay. Why would I ?" He grins thinly. "He's my brother. You don't turn away from someone like him just because he likes sick instead if the good stuff.”
― T.J. Klune, quote from Bear, Otter, and the Kid
“In Japan, first names are only for who you're married to, or if you're being rude,' the watchmaker explained.”
― Natasha Pulley, quote from The Watchmaker of Filigree Street
Fatherland
Carpe Jugulum
The Darkest Hour
The Sugar Queen
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