Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Luck
Agree
Succeed
Goes
Greatest
Born
Sophocles
People
Joke
Jokes

More quotes by Slavoj Žižek

Image
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.
Slavoj Žižek
Image
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
Image
Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana.
Slavoj Žižek
Image
There is an old joke about socialism as the synthesis of the highest achievements of the whole human history to date: from prehistoric societies it took primitivism from the Ancient world it took slavery from medieval society brutal domination from capitalism exploitation and from socialism the name.
Slavoj Žižek
Image
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.
Slavoj Žižek
Image
It's bad if we are controlled, but if we're not, it can be even worse.
Slavoj Žižek
Image
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.
Slavoj Žižek
Image
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
Image
What we philosophers can do is just correct the questions.
Slavoj Žižek
Image
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
Image
Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.
Slavoj Žižek
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.
Slavoj Žižek
Image
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
Image
In Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.
Slavoj Žižek
Image
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
Image
Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.
Slavoj Žižek
Image
Words are never 'only words' they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.
Slavoj Žižek
Image
A spectre is haunting Western academia (...), the spectre of the Cartesian subject.
Slavoj Žižek