Guy Debord Quotes

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

  Guy Debord

  Love, Funny, Humorous

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• 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.

  Guy Debord

  Modern, Accumulation, Representation

  Guy Debord (2012). “Society Of The Spectacle”, p.30, Bread and Circuses Publishing

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• In our society now, we prefer to see ourselves living than living.

  Guy Debord

  Our Society

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• With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.

  Guy Debord

  Stories, Statistics, Fabulous

  Guy Debord (1998). “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle”, p.16, Verso

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• Revolution is not 'showing' life to people, but making them live. A revolutionary organization must always remember that its objective is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation.

  Guy Debord

  Order, Organization, People

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• Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.

  Guy Debord

  Motivation, Real, Simple

  Guy Debord (2012). “Society Of The Spectacle”, p.32, Bread and Circuses Publishing

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• The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

  Guy Debord

  People, Social, Relation

  Guy Debord (2012). “Society Of The Spectacle”, p.30, Bread and Circuses Publishing

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• Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

  Guy Debord

  Ignorance, Belief, Periods

  Panegyric pt. 1 (1989)

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• In a world that has REALLY been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.

  Guy Debord

  World, Moments, Truth Is

  Guy Debord (1994). “The Society of the Spectacle”, Zone Books (NY)

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• ... just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.

  Guy Debord

  Focus, Culture, Existence

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• What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic. And what is genuine is reconstructed as quickly as possible, to resemble the false.

  Guy Debord

  Taste, Genuine, Eliminating

  Guy Debord (1998). “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle”, p.50, Verso

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

  Guy Debord

  Powerful, Class, Claims

  Guy Debord (2014). “The Society of the Spectacle”, p.39, Bureau of Public Secrets

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• The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.

  Guy Debord

  Dream, Sleep, Wish

  Guy Debord (2014). “The Society of the Spectacle”, p.7, Bureau of Public Secrets

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• All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.

  Guy Debord

  Representation, Mere

  Guy Debord (1994). “The Society of the Spectacle”, Zone Books (NY)

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• Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.

  Guy Debord

  Boredom, Revolutionary

  "The Bad Old Days Will End" by Guy Debord (November 1963); later quoted in "The Incomplete Works of the Situationist International" edited by Christopher Gray, 1974.

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• The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on this one point, however, because this officially nonexistent bureaucracy simultaneously attributes the crowning achievements of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its existence is everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy must be invisible as a class. As a result, all social life becomes insane.

  Guy Debord

  Powerful, Class, Achievement

  Guy Debord (2014). “The Society of the Spectacle”, p.39, Bureau of Public Secrets

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• Work is only justified by leisure time. To admit the emptiness of leisure time is to admit the impossibility of life.

  Guy Debord

  Leisure, Emptiness, Justified

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• Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.

  Guy Debord

  Children, Adventure, Lost

  Guy Debord, Ken Knabb (2003). “Complete cinematic works: scripts, stills, documents”, A K Pr Distribution

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

  Guy Debord

  Language, Familiar

  Guy Debord (1998). “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle”, p.31, Verso

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• Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

  Guy Debord

  Art, Past, Organization

  Internationale Situationist (Paris), No. 1, June 1958.

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• 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.

  Guy Debord

  Stories, Terrorism, Cases

  Guy Debord (1998). “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle”, p.24, Verso

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• It is hardly surprising that children should enthusiastically start their education at an early age with the Absolute Knowledge of computer science; while they are unable to read, for reading demands making judgments at every line. Conversation is almost dead, and soon so too will be those who knew how to speak.

  Guy Debord

  Children, Reading, Age

  Guy Debord (1998). “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle”, p.29, Verso

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• Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state's monopoly of armed violence.

  Guy Debord

  Army, Police, Violence

  Guy Debord, Ivan Chtcheglov, Asger Jorn, Raoul Vaneigem, Mustapha Khayati (2014). “Situationism: A Compendium”, p.33, Bread and Circuses Publishing

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• 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.

  Guy Debord

  Acting, Desire, Facts

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• people who personify the system are indeed well known for not being what they seem to be; they have achieved greatness by embracing a level of reality lower than that of the most insignificant individual life- and everyone knows it.

  Guy Debord

  Life, Reality, Greatness

  Guy Debord (1994). “The Society of the Spectacle”, Zone Books (NY)

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