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The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.

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
Desires
Satisfied
Desire
Problem

More quotes by Slavoj Žižek

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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 am what you might call abstractly anti-capitalist. For instance, I am suspicious of the old leftists who focus all their hatred on the United States. What about Chinese neo-colonialism? Why are the left silent about that? When I say this, it annoys them, of course. Good!
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Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana.
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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.
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When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.
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Love is what makes sex more than masturbation. If there is no love even if you are really with a partner you masturbate with a partner.
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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.
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But in a radically atheist universe, you are not only responsible for doing your duty, You are also responsible for deciding what is your duty.
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I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.
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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.
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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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A typical guy who buys organic food doesn't really buy it in order to be healthy he buys it to regain a kind of solidarity as the one who really cares about nature. He buys a certain ideological stance.
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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In the electoral campaign, President Bush named as the most important person in his life Jesus . Now he has a unique chance to prove that he meant it seriously: for him, as for all Americans today, Love thy neighbor! means Love the Muslims! OR IT MEANS NOTHING AT ALL.
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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The duty of a politician for me is to be a representative: a politician is not an expert, experts are experts, hired for their expertise and so on.
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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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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!»
Slavoj Žižek
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Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.
Slavoj Žižek
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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.
Slavoj Žižek