“There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.”
“Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.”
“Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.”
“There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.”
“What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.”
“The world is not dialectical -- it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.”
“Genius is childhood recaptured.”
“You are born modern, you do not become so.”
“What is a society without a heroic dimension?”
“Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.”
“It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.”
“It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.”
“A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.”
“The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.”
“Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.”
“Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.”
“We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.”
“The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.”
“If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.”
“Every woman is like a time-zone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night.”
“Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.”
“The surprises of thought are like those of love: they wear out. But here too you can carry on for a long time doing your conjugal duty.”
“In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.”
“Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don't even arise.”
“Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved -- commitment to a scenario.”
“The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.”
“Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.”
“At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.”
“The order of the world is always right -- such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin.”
“If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams then you must still regard America today with the same naive enthusiasm as the generations that discovered the New World.”