Quote

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

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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
Urges
Mask
Active
Threat
Passivity
Activity
Pseudo
Goes
Participate
Today
Nothingness
Urge

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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What we philosophers can do is just correct the questions.
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Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.
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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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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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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.
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In Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.
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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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Words are never 'only words' they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.
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Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.
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