Raoul Vaneigem Quotes (22 Quotes)


    Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out.

    To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.

    The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself.

    Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.

    Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.


    People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.

    There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies.

    In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption.

    Production and consumption are the nipples of modern society. Thus suckled, humanity grows in strength and beauty rising standard of living, all modern conveniences, distractions of all kinds, culture for all, the comfort of your dreams.

    Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.

    In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.

    People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination.


    The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance. . .

    We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.

    In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted. . .

    The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.

    Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?

    Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete.

    As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.

    Ideally a book would have no order in it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

    We must discover new frontiers... People have been standing for centuries before a worm-eaten door, making pinholes in it with increasing ease. The time has come to kick it down, for it is only on the other side that everything begins.


    More Raoul Vaneigem Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Life - People - Work & Career - Death & Dying - Custom & Convention - Society & Civilization - Desire - Monarchy - Dancing - Literature - Boredom - Kings & Queens - Time - Anger - Humanity - Power - Enemy - Pleasure - Dreams - View All Raoul Vaneigem Quotations

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