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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If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.
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Politicians - power itself - are abject because they merely embody the profound contempt people have for their own lives. One should be grateful to the politicians for accepting the abstractness of power, and ridding others of its burden. This inevitably kills them but they get their revenge by passing onto others the corpse of power.
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We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.
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.
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The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body.
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The new shopping malls make possible the synthesis of all consumer activities, not least of which are shopping, flirting with objects, idle wandering, and all the permutations of these.
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Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened.
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It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us unintelligibly, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.
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The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.
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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.
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Sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public.
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Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.
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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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At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance.
Jean Baudrillard
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A woman spent all Christmas Day in a telephone box without ringing anyone. If someone comes to phone, she leaves the box, then resumes her place afterwards. No one calls her either, but from a window in the street, someone watched her all day, no doubt since they had nothing better to do. The Christmas syndrome.
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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Pornography is the quadraphonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules. Science has already habituated us to this microscopics, this excess of the real in its microscopic detail, this voyeurism of exactitude.
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Simulation is the situation created by any system of signs when it becomes sophisticated enough, autonomous enough, to abolish its own referent and to replace it with itself.
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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The price we pay for the complexity of life is too high.
Jean Baudrillard