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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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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
Chaos
Visited
Saws
Replied
Asked
Shocked
Painting
Officers
Guernica
Second
German
Modernist
War
Studio
Calmly
World
Paris
Picasso
Studios
Officer

More quotes by Slavoj Žižek

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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 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.
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What we philosophers can do is just correct the questions.
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Words are never 'only words' they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.
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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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In Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.
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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
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Liberal democracy - as you know, in the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today's left effectively offers global capitalism with a human face, more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not.
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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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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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It's bad if we are controlled, but if we're not, it can be even worse.
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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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Atheism is not the denial of the existence of God, but having doubts as to whether God is conscious.
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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.
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When we are shown scenes of starving children in Africa, with a call for us to do something to help them, the underlying ideological message is something like: Don't think, don't politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think!
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