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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.

Slavoj Žižek

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Slavoj Žižek
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: March 21
Cultural Critic
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Slavoj Zizek
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More quotes by Slavoj Žižek

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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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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
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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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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
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When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.
Slavoj Žižek
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What we philosophers can do is just correct the questions.
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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We should not oppose something just because it was appropriated by the wrong guys rather, we should think about how to reappropriate it.
Slavoj Žižek
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I - and I still consider myself, I'm sorry to tell you, a Marxist and a Communist, but I couldn't help noticing how all the best Marxist analyses are always analyses of a failure.
Slavoj Žižek
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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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I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.
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 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.
Slavoj Žižek
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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!
Slavoj Žižek
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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
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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.
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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My big fear is that if I act the way I am, people will notice that there is nothing to see. So I have to be active all the time, covering up.
Slavoj Žižek
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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
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A spectre is haunting Western academia (...), the spectre of the Cartesian subject.
Slavoj Žižek