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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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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
Human
Ancient
Societies
Humans
Jokes
Brutal
Whole
Highest
Date
Prehistoric
World
Took
Joke
Synthesis
Name
Socialism
Medieval
Names
Slavery
Achievements
Society
Capitalism
Domination
History
Achievement
Exploitation

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I almost stopped teaching entirely. The worst thing for me is contact with students. I like universities without students. And I especially hate American students. They think you owe them something. They come to you ... Office hours!
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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!»
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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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While just looking, we are always hunting among objects, looking for what we desire or fear, endeavoring to recognize some pattern on the other hand, objects themselves always stare back, vie for our attention, throw at us their lures and endeavor to entrap us.
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Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.
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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!
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Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.
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In Stalinism the tragedy is that its origin is some kind of radical emancipatory project. In the origins you had a kind of workers' uprising the true enigma is how this project of emancipation went so wrong.
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In Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.
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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.
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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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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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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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The ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.
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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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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.
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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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I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.
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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.
Slavoj Žižek
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If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.
Slavoj Žižek