Paul Virilio > Quotes

“There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We'll dream of being blind.”
― Paul Virilio

“The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck”
― Paul Virilio

“With the industrial proliferation of visual and audiovisual prostheses and unrestrained use of instantaneous-transmission equipment from earliest childhood onwards, we now routinely see the encoding of increasingly elaborate mental images together with a steady decline in retention rates and recall. In other words we are looking at the rapid collapse of mnemonic consolidation. This collapse seems only natural, if one remembers a contrario that seeing, and its spatio-temporal organization, precede gesture and speech and their coordination in knowing, recognizing, making known (as images of our thoughts), our thoughts themselves and cognitive functions, which are never ever passive.”
― Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine

“There are no pessimists; there are only realists and liars.”
― Paul Virilio

“The contemporary sedentary is someone who feels at home everywhere, thanks to cellphones, and the nomad is someone who does not feel at home anywhere, someone who is excluded, ostracized.”
― Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear

“An old Japanese friend recently confided to me: ' I can't forgive to americans for the fact that Hiroshima wasn't an act of war, but an experiment'.”
― Paul Virilio

“Since there was no longer a horizon towards which to rush, they would invent fake ones - substitute horizons.”
― Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb

“How can we ultimately fail to twig that the apparent impiety of contemporary art is only ever the inverted image of sacred art, the reversal of the creator's initial question: why is there something instead of nothing?”
― Paul Virilio, Art and Fear

“Speed now illuminates reality whereas light once gave objects of the world their shape.”
― Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear

“By the way, who invented Peace?”
― Paul Virilio, Bunker Archeology

“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.”
― Paul Virilio

“The fear of exposing one's private life gives way to the desire to "over-expose" it to every one.”
― Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb

“The true hero of the American utopia is neither the cowboy nor the soldier, but the pioneer, the pathfinder, the person who 'takes his body, where his eyes have been'.”
― Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb

“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution...Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.”
― Paul Virilio

“It is, in fact, impossible clearly to distinguish economic war from information war, since each involves the same hegemonic ambition of making commercial and military exchanges interactive”
― Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb

“The reconciliation of nothing and reality and the suspension of time and space by high velocities replace the exoticism of journeys with a vast expanse of emptiness.”
― Paul Virilio

“Il faut penser à ce qui arrive - nous sommes les producteurs de l'avenir.”
― Paul Virilio

“[Speed] ostensibly perverts the illusory order of normal perception, the order of arrival of information. What could have seemed simultaneous is diversified and decomposes. With speed, the world keeps on coming at us, to the detriment of the object, which is itself now assimilated to the sending of information. It is this intervention that destroys the world as we know it, technique now reproducing permanently the violence of the accident; the mystery of speed remains a secret of light and heat from which even sound is missing.”
― Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance

“Bombe atomique hier, bombe informatique aujourd'hui et, demain, bombe génétique?”
― Paul Virilio

“The achievement of star status itself would seem to be based not on talent or good looks any more, but on the risks taken for the camera by a whole host of stuntmen brought in from the fairgrounds and circuses: trick riding, controlled falls, suspended accidents and suicidal exploits, leading, with the coming of 'live' transmission, to the 'confessional' TV programme, to the so-called reality show, which shades over, at the edges, into the snuff movie.”
― Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb

“The question today, then, is whether the world's populations are not close to having done with soft sciences and technologies, which still take into account the preservation of the planet and its inhabitants; whether they are not now in danger of being swept away by the terrorist excesses of a Laputian ratio, a universal philanoia attacking a human species which has become 'undesirable' in its entirety, the scandal of an Earth which is, so far as we know, the only biosphere in the solar system.”
― Paul Virilio, Ground Zero

“The moment they appeared on the scene, the first optical devices (Al-Hasan ibn al-Haitam aka Alhazen's camera obscura in the tenth century, Roger Bacon's instruments in the thirteenth, the increasing number of visual prostheses, lenses, astronomic telescopes and so on from the Renaissance on) profoundly altered the contexts in which mental images were topographically stored and retrieved, the impera- tive to re-present oneself, the imaging of the imagination which was such a great help in mathematics according to Descartes and which he considered a veritable part of the body, veram partem corporis. Just when we were apparently procuring the means to see further and better the unseen of the universe, we were about to lose what little power had of imagining it. The telescope, that epitome of the visual prosthesis, projected an image of a world beyond our reach and thus another way of moving about in the world, the logistics of perception inaugurating an unknown conveyance of sight that produced a tele- scoping of near and far, a phenomenon of acceleration obliterating our experience of distances and dimensions.”
― Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine

“Si inventer la substance, c'est indirectement inventer l'accident, plus l'invention est puissant, performante, et plus l'accident est dramatique.”
― Paul Virilio