Slavoj Žižek Quotes

Quotes about:

• What if the way we perceive a problem is already part of the problem?

  Slavoj Žižek

  What If, Way, Problem

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• If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.

  Slavoj Žižek

  If You Love Someone, Reason, Ifs

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• The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Pseudo, Goes On, Today

  Slavoj Žižek (2014). “Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism”, p.170, Penguin UK

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• We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Language, Thrive, Feels

  Slavoj Žižek (2002). “Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates”, p.2, Verso

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• Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Thinking, Hands, Years

  "Mapping Ideology" by Slavoj Žižek, p.1, 1994.

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• Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Matter, Can Do

  Slavoj Žižek (2009). “First As Tragedy, Then As Farce”, p.109, Verso

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• Thinking begins when you ask really difficult questions.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Thinking, Difficult Questions, Difficult

  "Slavoj Zizek: I am not the world’s hippest philosopher!". Interview with Katie Engelhart, www.salon.com. December 29, 2012.

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• Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.

  Slavoj Žižek

  People, Humanity, Idiot

  "Slavoj Žižek: 'Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots'" by Decca Aitkenhead, www.theguardian.com. June 10, 2012.

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• Often, the worst way to become prisoner of a system is to have a dream that things may turn better, there is always the possibility of change. Because it is precisely this secret dream that keeps you enslaved to the system.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Dream, Possibility Of Change, Secret

  Interview with Dianna Dilworth, www.believermag.com. July 2004.

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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

  Sex, Love Is, Masturbation

  HARDtalk Interview, BBC World Service, January 12, 2010.

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• Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Reality, Fiction

  Slavoj Žižek (2012). “Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism”, p.4, Verso Books

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• The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Desire, Problem, Satisfied

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• I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Names, Eating, Trash

  "The Pervert's Guide to Ideology". Documentary, 2012.

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• Atheism is not the denial of the existence of God, but having doubts as to whether God is conscious.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Doubt, Atheism, Denial

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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

  War, Paris, Guernica

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• Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Small Pleasures, Emergencies, Ruins

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• The horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things -- they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Thinking, People, Horror

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• Why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than as problems of inequality, exploitation, or injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, rather than emancipation, political struggle, or even armed struggle?

  Slavoj Žižek

  Struggle, Political, Tolerance

  Slavoj Žižek, Slavoj Zizek (2011). “Living in the End Times”, p.5, Verso

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• I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Philosophy, Thinking, Way

  YouTube Chanel "radekk76"/ "Zizek - Year of Distraction", www.youtube.com. July 5, 2011.

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• What if culture itself is nothing but a halt, a break, a respite, in the pursuit of barbarity?

  Slavoj Žižek

  What If, Culture, Break

  Slavoj Žižek, Slavoj Zizek (2011). “Living in the End Times”, p.6, Verso

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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

  Children, Thinking, Poverty

  Slavoj Žižek, Slavoj Zizek (2011). “Living in the End Times”, p.4, Verso

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• I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it.

  Slavoj Žižek

  People, Luck, Goes On

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• The ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Dream, Reality, Knowledge And Power

  Slavoj Žižek (2001). “Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?”, Verso Books

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• Postcolonialism is the invention of some rich guys from India who saw that they could make a good career in top Western universities by playing on the guilt of white liberals.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Careers, White, Guy

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• As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Reality, Consistency, Fiction

  Slavoj Žižek (1993). “Tarrying with the negative: Kant, Hegel, and the critique of ideology”, Duke University Press Books

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