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We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom- war on terror and so on-falsifies freedom.

Slavoj Žižek

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Slavoj Žižek
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: March 21
Cultural Critic
Cultural Studies Scholar
Essayist
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Politician
Psychoanalyst
Psychologist
Sociologist
Theologian
Ljubljana
Slovenia
Slavoj Zizek
Freedom
Freedoms
Language
Articulate
War
Heroic
Speak
Red
Way
Terror
Hero
Missing
Falsifies
Taught
Ink

More quotes by Slavoj Žižek

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We usually speak of the Jewish-Christian civilization - perhaps, the time has come, especially with regard to the Middle East conflict, to talk about the Jewish-Muslim civilization as an axis opposed to Christianity.
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For the multiculturalist, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are prohibited, Italians and Irish get a little respect, blacks are good, native Americans are even better. The further away we go, the more they deserve respect. This is a kind of inverted, patronising respect that puts everyone at a distance.
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What Americans don't want to admit ... is that not only is there not a contradiction between state regulation and freedom, but in order for us to actually be free in our social interactions, there must be an extremely elaborated network of health, law, institutions, moral rules and so on.
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I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.
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In Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.
Slavoj Žižek
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The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland—a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth—can bring to a standstill the aerial traffic over an entire continent is a reminder of how, with all its power to transform nature, humankind remains just another species on the planet Earth.
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The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to be active, to participate, to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.
Slavoj Žižek
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We should not oppose something just because it was appropriated by the wrong guys rather, we should think about how to reappropriate it.
Slavoj Žižek
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The fantasy which serves as a support for the figure of the Stalinist Communist is therefore exactly the same as the fantasy which is at work in the Tom and Jerry cartoons.
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The liberal idea of tolerance is more and more a kind of intolerance. What it means is 'Leave me alone don't harass me I'm intolerant towards your over-proximity.
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It's bad if we are controlled, but if we're not, it can be even worse.
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When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.
Slavoj Žižek
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A German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist «chaos» of the painting, asked Picasso: «Did you do this?» Picasso calmly replied: «No, you did this!»
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If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.
Slavoj Žižek
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It is more satisfying to sacrifice oneself for the poor victim than to enable the other to overcome their victim status and perhaps become even more succesfull than ourselves
Slavoj Žižek
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Often, the worst way to become prisoner of a system is to have a dream that things may turn better, there is always the possibility of change. Because it is precisely this secret dream that keeps you enslaved to the system.
Slavoj Žižek
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In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being.
Slavoj Žižek
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What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I'm a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets - it's a very sad lesson - by their intervention, saved the myth.
Slavoj Žižek
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Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.
Slavoj Žižek
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I almost stopped teaching entirely. The worst thing for me is contact with students. I like universities without students. And I especially hate American students. They think you owe them something. They come to you ... Office hours!
Slavoj Žižek