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
Born
Sophocles
People
Joke
Jokes
Luck
Agree
Succeed
Goes
Greatest

More quotes by Slavoj Žižek

Image
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.
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
It's bad if we are controlled, but if we're not, it can be even worse.
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
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
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
Thinking begins when you ask really difficult questions.
Slavoj Žižek
Image
The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.
Slavoj Žižek
Image
If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.
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
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
Image
What we philosophers can do is just correct the questions.
Slavoj Žižek
Image
Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.
Slavoj Žižek
Image
The ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.
Slavoj Žižek
Image
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
Image
Postcolonialism is the invention of some rich guys from India who saw that they could make a good career in top Western universities by playing on the guilt of white liberals.
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
You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.
Slavoj Žižek
Image
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
Image
Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.
Slavoj Žižek