Slavoj Žižek Quotes

With the million or more words contained in the English language, one notorious word has been able t...

as soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions...

So when the ruling ideology enjoins us to enjoy sex, not to feel guilty about it, since we are not b...

We do not get to vote on who owns what, or on relations in factory and so on, for all this is deemed...

First —we should restrain our anti-colonialist joy here— the question to be raised is: if Europe is ...

The Christian motto 'All men are brothers', however, also means that those who do not accept brother...

We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

I - and I still consider myself, I'm sorry to tell you, a Marxist and a Communist, but I couldn't he...

You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as...

I think boredom is the beginning of every authentic act. (...) Boredom opens up the space, for new e...

I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a...

Was 9/11 not the 20th congress of the American Dream?

We don't really want to get what we think that we want.I am married to a wife and relationship with ...

I like to search for class struggle in strange domains. For example it is clear that in classical Ho...

If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.

Any critique of Islam is denounced as an expression of Western Islamophobia, Salman Rushdie is denou...

What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets we...

Georgi M. Derluguian's Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus tells the extraordinary story of Mu...

There is a contradiction between market liberalism and political liberalism. The market liberals (e....

Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us ...

Experts are by definition the servants of those in power: they don't really THINK, they just apply t...

Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins ...

The same rightists who decades ago were shouting, 'Better dead than red!' are now often heard mumbli...

Because the horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things — they always do. I...

Since, in our societies, a gendered division of labor still predominates which confers a male twist ...

The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland—a small disturbance in the complex m...

In this way the world market is, with regard to its immanent dynamic, 'a space in which everyone has...

Nowadays, you can do anything that you want—anal, oral, fisting—but you need to be wearing gloves, c...

For the multiculturalist, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are prohibited, Italians and Irish get a lit...

We’re not dreamers. We’re awaking from a dream turning into a nightmare. We’re not destroying anythi...

When we are shown scenes of starving children in Africa, with a call for us to do something to help ...

Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.

€7,500, first-class, everything—and all that for 40 minutes selling them some old stuff.

This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public ...

How do we account for this paradox that the absence of Law universalizes prohibition ... The psychoa...

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

This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public ...

If Stalin gives you a love advice, it has to succeed.

The cliche about prison life is that I am actually integrated into it, ruined by it, when my accommo...

You cannot change people but you can change the system so that people are not pushed into doing evil...

After all, what Buddhism offers as a solution is universalised indifference - a learning of how to w...

Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of ph...

[T]his readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: W...

The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we de...

We Slovenians are even better misers than you Scottish. You know how Scotland began? One of us Slove...

The socioeconomic impact of such a minor outburst is due to our technological development (air trave...

Sexuality is the only drive that is in itself hindered, perverted: simultaneously insufficient and e...

The only way to survive such shitty times, if you ask me, is to write and read big, fat books, you k...

Liberal attitudes towards the other are characterized both by respect for otherness, openness to it,...

The Deleuzian philosopher Brian Massumi clearly formulated how today's capitalism has already overco...

On the 'Celestial Seasonings' green tea packet there is a short explanation of its benefits: 'Green ...

Ultimately,we hear things because we cannot see everything.

[O]ne cannot separate violence from the very exist­ ence of the state (as the apparatus of class dom...

Ideology is strong exactly because it is no longer experienced as ideology… we feel free because we ...

But what about the apparent absurdity of the idea of dignity, freedom, and reason, sustained by extr...

Alain Badiou was once seated amongst the public in a room where I was delivering a talk, when his ce...

In Kant’s description, ethical duty functions like a foreign traumatic intruder that from the outsid...

If the secret core of potlatch is the reciprocity of exchange, why is this reciprocity not asserted ...

Recall Marx’s fundamental insight about the “bourgeois” limitation of the logic of equality: capital...

The “pursuit of happiness” is such a key element of the “American (ideological) dream” that one tend...

Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.

What one should add here is that self-consciousness is itself unconscious: we are not aware of the p...