Raoul Vaneigem

“The key is within each of us. No instructions come with it.”

“My creativity, no matter how poor, is for me a far better guide than all the knowledge with which my head has been crammed. In the night of Power, its glimmer keeps the enemy forces at bay.”

“To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.”

“Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.”

“In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption.”

“To talk of a modern work of art enduring is sillier than talking of the eternal values of Standard Oil.”

“The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.”

“Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?”

“We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.”

“It is entirely up to us to invent our own lives.”

“Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.”

“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.”

“There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies.”

“Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete.”

“Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out.”

“Work is the opposite of creativity.”

“As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.”

“Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.”

“Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.”

“Purchasing power is a license to purchase power.”