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

More quotes by 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.
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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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The duty of a politician for me is to be a representative: a politician is not an expert, experts are experts, hired for their expertise and so on.
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Atheism is not the denial of the existence of God, but having doubts as to whether God is conscious.
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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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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
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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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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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When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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We should not oppose something just because it was appropriated by the wrong guys rather, we should think about how to reappropriate it.
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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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If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.
Slavoj Žižek
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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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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