Guy Debord Quotes: 18

• Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.

• The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.

  The Society of the Spectacle

• Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

• In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

• The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.

  The Society of the Spectacle

• Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.

• The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive… compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.

  The Society of the Spectacle

• There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.

• He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with.

• Le spectacle est le mauvais rêve de la société moderne enchaînée, qui n'exprime finalement que son désir de dormir. Le spectacle est le gardien de ce sommeil.

• Partout où il y a représentation indépendante, le spectacle se reconstitue.

  The Society of the Spectacle

• On ne peut opposer absraitement le spectacle et l'activité sociale effective.

• Le spectacle est la reconstruction matérielle de l'illusion religieuse.

• Le but n'est rien, le développement est tout. Le spectacle ne veut en venir à rien d'autre qu'à lui-même.

• Le spectacle est la principale production de la société actuelle.

• Il est le soleil qui ne se couche jamais sur l'empire de la passivité moderne. Il recouvre toute la surface du monde et baigne indéfiniment dans sa propre gloire.

• Il est ce qui échappe à l'activité des hommes, à la reconsidération et à la correction de leur œuvre.

• Dont tout «avoir» effectif doit tirer son prestige immédiat et sa fonction dernière.