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Words are never 'only words' they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.

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
Words
Matter
Never
Contours
Define

More quotes by 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 ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.
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I may still be a kind of a Marxist but I'm very realistic, I don't have these dreams of revolutionists around the corner.
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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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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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Ideology is a certain unique experience of the universe and your place in it, to put it in standard terms, which serves the production of the existing power relations and blah blah blah.
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Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana.
Slavoj Žižek
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If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.
Slavoj Žižek
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Atheism is not the denial of the existence of God, but having doubts as to whether God is conscious.
Slavoj Žižek
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I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it.
Slavoj Žižek
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The true ethical test is not only the readiness to save the victims, but also - even more, perhaps - the ruthless dedication to annihilating those who made them victims.
Slavoj Žižek
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You can be a fanatical millennialist religious mystic, and you are, in a certain way, not outside of ideology. Your position can be that of perfectly describing the data and nonetheless your point is ideological.
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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True universalists are not those who preach global tolerance of differences and all-encompassing unity, but those who engage in a passionate struggle for the assertion of the Truth which compels them.
Slavoj Žižek
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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.
Slavoj Žižek
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With Lenin it was always a substantial commitment. I always have a certain admiration for people who are aware that somebody has to do the job. What I hate about these liberal, pseudo-left, beautiful soul academics is that they are doing what they are doing fully aware that somebody else will do the job for them.
Slavoj Žižek
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It's bad if we are controlled, but if we're not, it can be even worse.
Slavoj Žižek
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We Slovenians are even better misers than you Scottish. You know how Scotland began? One of us Slovenians was spending too much money, so we put him on a boat and he landed in Scotland.
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
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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.
Slavoj Žižek