Paul Virilio Quotations

The thing about collaborators is that you don't know you are one whereas as a member of the resistance, you do. [In WWII,] the worst cases of collaboration weren't among the real collaborators, that official militia, but among the people at large, who were collaborators without knowing it, by a sort of laxity, an apathy.

It will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed 'the integral accident' that is the continuation of politics by other means.

... the blinding Hiroshima flash... literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things, so that every surface immediately became war's recording surface, its film.

While the human gaze becomes more and more fixed, losing some of its natural speed and sensitivity, photographic shots, on the contrary, become even faster.

War was my university. Everything has proceeded from there.

Speed now illuminates reality whereas light once gave objects of the world their shape.

Time is not something that can be measured with a pendule. Time is something that we build together within a tribe, a family, a region.

Already, viral contamination offers an initial response to the question of the downside of electronic circuits, but another area of research beckons the area of ecological pollution. The pollution not only of air, water, and other substances, but also the unperceived pollution of distances.

The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.

In industrialized warfare, where the representation of events outstripped the presentation of facts, the image was starting to gain sway over the object, time over space. Soon a conflict of strategic and political interpretation would ensue, with radio and then radar completing the picture.