Raoul Vaneigem > Quotes

“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”
― Raoul Vaneigem

“The millions of human beings who were shot, tortured, starved, treated like animals and made the object of a conspiracy of ridicule, can sleep in peace in their communal graves, for at least the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to believe, on the strength of their daily dose of television, that they are happy and free. The Communards went down, fighting to the last, so that you too could qualify for a Caribbean cruise.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

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

“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.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Daydreaming subverts the world.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Purchasing power is a license to purchase power. The old proletariat sold its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time it had was passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“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.”
― Raoul Vaneigem

“If love is under siege, it is because it threatens the very essence of commercial civilization. Everything is designed to make us forget that love is our most vivid manifestation and the most common power of life that is in us. Shouldn't we wonder how the lights that glimmer in the eye can blow a fuse for a time, even as barriers of oppression break and jam our passions? Yet despite a life stunted and distorted by mediated Spectacle, nothing has ever managed to strip love of its primal force. Although the heart's music fails to overwhelm the cacophony of profit efficiency, bit by bit it composes our destinies, according to tones, chords, and dissonances which render us happy if only we learn to harmonize the scattered notes that string emotions together.”
― Raoul Vaneigem

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

“Suffering is the pain of constraints. An atom of pure delight, no matter how small, can hold it at bay.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“What drives us to despair is not the immensity of our unsatisfied desires, but the moment when our fledgling passion discovers its own emptiness. Insatiable desire for passionate knowledge of one pretty girl after another stems from anxiety and from fear of love, so afraid are we of never encountering anything but objects. The dawn when lovers leave each other's arms is the same dawn that breaks on the execution of revolutionaries without a revolution. Isolation a deux cannot prevail over the isolation of all. Pleasure is broken off prematurely and lovers find themselves naked in the world, their actions suddenly ridiculous and feeble. No love is possible in an unhappy world.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“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.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“No more Guernicas, no more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin?”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“It is much more a lack of fun which batters us than over abundance and indulgence”
― Raoul Vaneigem

“God cannot know anything, will anything or do anything without me. With God I created myself, I created all things, and my hand holds up heaven, earth and all the creatures of the earth. Without me there is nothing.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Malaise invades me as the crowd around me grows. The compromises I have made with stupidity under the pressure of circumstances rush to meet me, swimming towards me in hallucinating waves of faceless heads. Edvard Munch's famous painting, The Cry, evokes for me something I feel ten times a day. A man carried along by a crowd, which only he can see, suddenly screams out in an attempt to break the spell, to call himself back to himself, to get back inside his own skin. The tacit acknowledgments, fixed smiles, lifeless words, listlessness and humiliation sprinkled in his path suddenly surge into him, driving him out of his desires and his dreams and exploding the illusion of 'being together'. People touch without meeting; isolation accumulates but is never realized; emptiness overcomes us as the density of the crowd grows. The crowd drags me out of myself and installs thousands of little sacrifices in my empty presence.

Everywhere neon signs are flashing out the dictum of Plotinus: All beings are together though each remains separate. But we only need to hold out our hands and touch one another, to raise our eyes and meet one another, and everything comes into focus, as if by magic.”
― Raoul Vaneigem

“Qu’est-ce que le nihilisme ? Rozanov répond parfaitement à la question quand il écrit : “La représentation est terminée. Le public se lève. Il est temps d’enfiler son manteau et de rentrer à la maison. On se retourne : plus de manteau ni de maison.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations

“Those whom Power can neither govern nor kill, it taxes with madness.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Everywhere the same law holds good: ‘There is no weapon of your individual will which, once appropriated by others, does not turn against you.’ If”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“If I must die, at least let me die as I have occasionally loved.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“I refuse to be called by any name, and suddenly, beneath the unnameable, I discover the wealth of lived experience, inexpressible poetry, the preconditions of supersession.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Identification with an ethnic or national community, with a religion, ideology, or any abstraction is nothing but a blood-soaked delusion.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“O trabalho foi aquilo que o homem achou de melhor para nada fazer da sua vida.”
― Raoul Vaneigem

“Oppression is no longer centralized, for it is everywhere. The positive aspect of this disintegration is that everyone begins to see, in their state of almost complete isolation, that they must first save themselves, make themselves the centre, and from their own subjectivity build a world where they can be at home anywhere.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Because of its increasing triviality, everyday life has gradually become our central preoccupation”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“They spend their weeks waiting for Work to go put on its Sunday clothes.”
― Raoul Vaneigem

“We live our roles better than our own lives.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“Whatever you possess possesses you in return.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“The feeling of ‘having done one’s duty’ makes everyone into their own honourable executioner.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

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