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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.

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
Experts
Politician
Duty
Representative
Hired
Expertise
Expert
Representatives

More quotes by Slavoj Žižek

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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!
Slavoj Žižek
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Ideology is a certain unique experience of the universe and your place in it, to put it in standard terms, which serves the production of the existing power relations and blah blah blah.
Slavoj Žižek
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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.
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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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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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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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
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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
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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.
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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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
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The true ethical test is not only the readiness to save the victims, but also - even more, perhaps - the ruthless dedication to annihilating those who made them victims.
Slavoj Žižek
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It's bad if we are controlled, but if we're not, it can be even worse.
Slavoj Žižek
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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!»
Slavoj Žižek
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What we philosophers can do is just correct the questions.
Slavoj Žižek
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I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.
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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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.
Slavoj Žižek
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Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.
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