Raoul Vaneigem Quotes

The millions of human beings who were shot, tortured, starved, treated like animals and made the object of a conspiracy of ridicule, can sleep in peace in their communal graves, for at least the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to believe, on the strength of their daily dose of television, that they are happy and free. The Communards went down, fighting to the last, so that you too could qualify for a Caribbean cruise.

The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.

Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?

The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself.

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.

Production and consumption are the nipples of modern society. Thus suckled, humanity grows in strength and beauty; rising standard of living, all modern conveniences, distractions of all kinds, culture for all, the comfort of your dreams.

Suffering is the pain of constraints. An atom of pure delight, no matter how small, can hold it at bay.

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power. The old proletariat sold its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time it had was passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology.

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power.

To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.

Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume; the hellish cycle is complete.

The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life.

The world of the commodity is a world upside-down, which bases itself not upon life but upon the transformation of life into work.

Work is the opposite of creativity.

Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.

I do not dream of a gentle revolution. My passion runs to the violence of supersession, the ferocity of a life that renounces nothing.

The history of our times calls to mind those Walt Disney characters who rush madly over the edge of a cliff without seeing it, so that the power of their imagination keeps them suspended in mid-air; but as soon as they look down and see where they are, they fall.

Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.

In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the

We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.

Privative appropriation and domination are thus originally imposed and felt as a positive right, but in the form of a negative universality. Valid for everyone, justified in everyone's eyes by divine or natural law, the right of privative appropriation is objectified in a general illusion, in a universal transcendence, in an essential law under which everyone individually manages to tolerate the more or less narrow limits assigned to his right to live and to the conditions of life in general.

Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.

The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.

In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life.

Where constraint breaks people, and mediation makes fools of them, the seduction of power is what makes them love their oppression. Because of it, people give up their real riches for a cause that mutilates them; for an appearance that reifies them; for roles that wrest them from authentic life; for a time whose passage defines and confines them.

In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption.

Daydreaming subverts the world.

People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure, but of the use to which they are.

There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies.

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.

As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.

Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out.

We have a world of pleasure to win, and nothing to lose but boredom.

What could I wish for the present but to take the greatest pleasure in being what I am?

Hope is the leash of submission.

It is entirely up to us to invent our own lives.

Each component of the organism, like the individual in the social body, possesses the capacity for enjoyment of the self through sharing with others.

To work for delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable from preparing for a general insurrection

People are bewitched into believing that time slips away, and this belief is the basis of time actually slipping away.