Maier Nick > Nick's Quotes

“Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

“Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other”
― Slavoj Zizek

“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates

“Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Because the horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things — they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great."

[Six Questions for Slavoj Žižek, Harper's Magazine, November 11, 2011]”
― Slavoj Žižek

“The true ethical test is not only the readiness to save the victims, but also - even more, perhaps - the ruthless dedication to annihilating those who made them victims.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“What about animals slaughtered for our consumption? who among us would be able to continue eating pork chops after visiting a factory farm in which pigs are half-blind and cannot even properly walk, but are just fattened to be killed? And what about, say, torture and suffering of millions we know about, but choose to ignore? Imagine the effect of having to watch a snuff movie portraying what goes on thousands of times a day around the world: brutal acts of torture, the picking out of eyes, the crushing of testicles -the list cannot bear recounting. Would the watcher be able to continue going on as usual? Yes, but only if he or she were able somehow to forget -in an act which suspended symbolic efficiency -what had been witnessed. This forgetting entails a gesture of what is called fetishist disavowal: "I know it, but I don't want to know that I know, so I don't know." I know it, but I refuse to fully assume the consequences of this knowledge, so that I can continue acting as if I don't know it.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections

“Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“For the multiculturalist, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are prohibited, Italians and Irish get a little respect, blacks are good, native Americans are even better. The further away we go, the more they deserve respect. This is a kind of inverted, patronising respect that puts everyone at a distance.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not, "Main Street, not Wall Street," but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.”
― Slavoj Zizek

“Q- What makes you depressed?

Seeing stupid people happy.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence - by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present - but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word 'quarters' the thing, it tears it out of the embedment in its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence: we speak about color, form, shape, etc., as if they possessed self-sufficient being.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out

“Truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves

“the lonliest sound in the world is other people making love.”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves

“I never understood people who said their greatest fear was public speaking, or spiders, or any of the other minor terrors. How could you fear anything more than death? Everything else offered moments of escape: a paralyzed man could still read Dickens; a man in the grips of dementia might have flashes of the must absurd beauty.”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves

“-What's the good news?
-Pardon?
-You said the bad news is we're going the wrong way.
-There isn't any good news. Just because there's bad news doesn't mean there's good news, too.”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves

“Perhaps a hero is someone who doesn’t register his own vulnerability. Is it courage, then, if you’re too daft to know you’re mortal?”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves