Guy Debord

“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.”

“Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.”

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

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

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

“The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative.”

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

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

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

“Le spectacle est la principale production de la société actuelle.”

“All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.”

“Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.”

“As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specialisations that they actually live.”

“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.”

“Behind the masks of total choice, different forms of the same alienation confront each other.”

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