Raoul Vaneigem Quotations

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

The key is within each of us. No instructions come with it.

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Ideally a book would have no order in it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

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

We must discover new frontiers... People have been standing for centuries before a worm-eaten door, making pinholes in it with increasing ease. The time has come to kick it down, for it is only on the other side that everything begins.

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

Hope is the leash of submission.

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

Daydreaming subverts the world.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Work is the opposite of creativity.

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

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.

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

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.