Raoul Vaneigem quotes

" Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete. " # Work # Cycles # Freedom

" People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure, but of the use to which they are " # Leisure # Imagination # Culture

" In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the " # Death and Dying # Action # Absence

" In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create. " # Industry # Desire # Work

" Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out. " # Insults # Government # Life and Living

" 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. " # Knowledge # Television # Banality

" Production and consumption are the nipples of modern society. Thus suckled, humanity grows in strength and beauty; rising standard of living, all modern conveniences, distractions of all kinds, culture for all, the comfort of your dreams. " # Materialism # Dreams # Beauty

" The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation. " # Materialism # Poverty and The Poor # Life and Living

" Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it. " # Nature # Courage # Writers and Writing

" The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself. " # Pleasure # Life and Living # Poetry and Poets