Gilles Deleuze

“If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.”

“A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.”

“Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.”

“The body of the woman is the overwhelming triumph of flesh. The woman is a concrete universal; she is a world, not an externalized world, but under the world, the warm interiority of the world, a compressed internalized world.”

“Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy.”

“In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.”

“A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds.”

“The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy which saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy. It is useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful. Its only use is the exposure of all forms of baseness of thought.”

“Morality consists in this for each individual: to attempt each time to extend its region of clear expression, to try to augment its amplitude, so as to produce a free act that expresses the most possible in one given condition or another. -- Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 73”

“An exhausted man is much more than a weary man. Does he exhaust the possible because he is himself exhausted, or is he exhausted because he has exhausted the possible? He exhausts himself by exhausting the possible, and inversely.”

“Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.”

“Israel has never hidden its goal, creating a vacuum in the Palestinian territory.”

“I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist.”

“Deleuze and Guattari have been totally misunderstood because the following has been wrenched from context: "Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political." (112)They are NOT advocating for this sort of prescriptive approach to language; rather, they are describing the social system around language--how language is a political tool. Why persist in quoting them as though they are promoting some sort of linguistic purity?”

“The speculative object and the practical object of philosophy as Naturalism, science and pleasure, coincide on this point: it is always a matter of denouncing the illusion, the false infinite, the infinity of religion and all of the theologico-erotic-oneiric myths in which it is expressed.”

“Intensities are implicated multiplicities, 'implexes,' made up of relations between asymmetrical elements.”

“In many ways the Palestinians are the new Indians, the Indians of Israel.”

“Christianity taught us to see the eye of the lord looking down upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk figures and icons and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows. They bind us to other realities, and especially the reality of power as it subjugates us. Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile and obedient subjects.”

“The best one can hope for is a government favorable to certain claims and demands from the Left.”

“The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual.”