Paul Virilio Quotes

The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light.

Science, which is not so attached to 'truth' as it once was, but more to immediate 'effectiveness', is now drifting towards a decline, it's civic fall from grace.

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

Digital messages and images matter less than their instantaneous delivery; the shock effect always wins out over the consideration of the informational content.

Speed now illuminates reality whereas light once gave objects of the world their shape.

The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.

To regain our liberty (and our distance), we must slow the images down.

How can we live if there is no more here and everything is now?

Images contaminate us like viruses.

Today, everything is about speed and real time. We are no longer concerned with real space.

Virtuality will destroy reality.

Wealth is the hidden side of speed and speed the hidden side of wealth.

Time is not something that can be measured with a pendule. Time is something that we build together within a tribe, a family, a region.

... the blinding Hiroshima flash... literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things, so that every surface immediately became war's recording surface, its film.

The technologies of virtual reality are attempting to make us see from beneath, from inside, from behind... as if we were God.

The true problem with virtual reality is that orientation is no longer possible. We have lost our points of reference to orient ourselves. The de-realized man is a disoriented man.

GPS not only played a large and delocalizing role in the war in Kosovo but is increasingly playing a role in social life.

Today, the media handle information as if it was a religious artefact.

What is accidented is reality.

War is cinema, and cinema is war

As I said back in 1984, the idea of logistics is not only about oil, about ammunitions and supplies but also about images.

If we consider my latest book, Strategie de la deception, what we need to focus on are the other aspects of the same phenomenon.

While the human gaze becomes more and more fixed, losing some of its natural speed and sensitivity, photographic shots, on the contrary, become even faster.

War was my university. Everything has proceeded from there.

One day the virtual world might win over the real world.

Cyberspace is an accident of the real. Virtual reality is the accident of reality itself.

Art is alive because it is mortal.

The simulator is an object in itself, which is different from televison and leads to cyberspace.

I have said many times before, interactivity is the equivalent of radioactivity. For interactivity effects a kind of disintegration, a kind of rupture.

Cyberspace is acting like God and deals with the idea of God who is, sees and hears everything.

It will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed 'the integral accident' that is the continuation of politics by other means.

Television exposes the world to the accident. The world is exposed to accidents through television.

Sovereignty no longer resides in the territory itself, but in the control of the territory. And localisation is an inherent part of that territorial control.

The creation of a virtual image is a form of accident. This explains why virtual reality is a cosmic accident. It's the accident of the real.

The media is more concerned with what we feel about the refugees and so on rather than what we think about them.

A museum of accidents is needed. This museum already exists, it's television.

We have already seen some instances of systemic risk in recent times in the Asian financial crisis. But what sparked off the Asian financial crisis? Automated trading programmes!

I pursue through my research on speed and on my study of the organisation of the revolution of the means of transportation.

Resistance is always possible! But we must engage in resistance first of all by developing the idea of a technological culture.

In a way, technologies have negated the transcendental God in order to invent the machine-God. However, these two gods raise similar questions.

For the time being, technologies are colonizing our body through implants. We started with human implants, but research leads us to microtechnological implants.

Even among the elite, in government circles, technological culture is somewhat deficient.

There is, then, a link between the logistics of perception, the wars in Lebanon and the Gulf as well as with CNN and the Pentagon.

Today, almost all-current technologies put the speed of light to work.

The automation of warfare has, then, come a long way since the Persian Gulf War of 1991.

Globalization cannot take shape without the speed of light.

Whoever controls the territory possesses it.

As I have said many times before, the speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light. And it is nothing else!

There is a buddhist proverb which I like a lot. It says: "Every body deserves mercy". That means that every body is holy.

The world and man are identical. This is why racism is the most stupid thing in the world.