Quote

Man has lost the basic skill of the ape, the ability to scratch its back. Which gave it extraordinary independence, and the liberty to associate for reasons other than the need for mutual back-scratching.

Jean Baudrillard

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Jean Baudrillard
Age: 77 †
Born: 1929
Born: July 29
Died: 2007
Died: March 6
Anthropologist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Photographer
Professor
Sociologist
Translator
Rheims
Ḻāṉ Pōtriyā
Needs
Skills
Associates
Men
Gave
Skill
Liberty
Mutual
Ability
Independence
Scratching
Lost
Basic
Scratch
Back
Reasons
Associate
Reason
Extraordinary
Scratches
Need
Evolution
Apes

More quotes by Jean Baudrillard

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... the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials - worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, a more ductile material than meaning... It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself.
Jean Baudrillard
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Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile.
Jean Baudrillard
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America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.
Jean Baudrillard
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[I]nside every computer, there is a hidden man being bored.
Jean Baudrillard
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The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance, but deceit and fraud.
Jean Baudrillard
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If you assume any rate of improvement at all then the games will become indistinguishable from reality. It would seem to follow that the odds that we are in base reality would be one in billions.
Jean Baudrillard
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Contact with men who wield power and authority still leaves an intangible sense of repulsion. It's very like being in close proximity to fecal matter, the fecal embodiment of something unmentionable, and you wonder what it is made of and when it acquired its historically sacred character.
Jean Baudrillard
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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.
Jean Baudrillard
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Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory. Men have only had an unconscious since they lost a territory.
Jean Baudrillard
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The multiplication of individual sects should not fool us: the important point is that the whole of America is preoccupied with the sect as a moral institution, with its immediate demand for beatification, its material efficacity, its compulsion for justification, and doubtless also with its madness and frenzy.
Jean Baudrillard
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Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.
Jean Baudrillard
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One has never said better how much humanism, normality, quality of life were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.
Jean Baudrillard
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Protect everything, detect everything, contain everything - obsessional society. Save time. Save money. Save our souls - phobic society. Low tar. Low energy. Low calories. Low sex. Low speed - anorexic society.
Jean Baudrillard
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Business owners are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an owner away from his business, he goes on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business. He never stops hurtling onwards, making decisions and executing them.
Jean Baudrillard
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There is no human reason to be here, except for the sheer ecstasy of being crowded together.
Jean Baudrillard
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The price we pay for the complexity of life is too high.
Jean Baudrillard
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We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.
Jean Baudrillard
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We are all hostages, and we are all terrorists. This circuit has replaced that other one of masters and slaves, the dominating and the dominated, the exploiters and the exploited. It is worse than the one it replaces, but at least it liberates us from liberal nostalgia and the ruses of history.
Jean Baudrillard
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This is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.
Jean Baudrillard
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Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.
Jean Baudrillard