Slavoj Žižek Quotes

Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.

What if the way we perceive a problem is already part of the problem?

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

The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.

I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.

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

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

Atheism is not the denial of the existence of God, but having doubts as to whether God is conscious.

Thinking begins when you ask really difficult questions.

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

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

Our biological body itself is a form of hardware that needs re-programming through tantra like a new spiritual software which can release or unblock its potential.

I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it.

As a Marxist, let me add: if anyone tells you Lacan is difficult, this is class propaganda by the enemy.

As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.

The ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.

Ideology is a certain unique experience of the universe and your place in it, to put it in standard terms, which serves the production of the existing power relations and blah blah blah.

Who dares to strike today, when having the security of a permanent job is itself becoming a privilege?

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

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.

Global capitalism is simply accepted as a fact that you cannot do anything about. The only question is, Will you accommodate yourself to it, or will you be dismissed and excluded?

Postcolonialism is the invention of some rich guys from India who saw that they could make a good career in top Western universities by playing on the guilt of white liberals.

Come on. I don't have any problem violating my own insights in practice.

The minimum necessary structuring ingredient of every ideology is to distance itself from another ideology, to denounce its other as ideology.

A spectre is haunting Western academia (...), the spectre of the Cartesian subject.

In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being.

My big fear is that if I act the way I am, people will notice that there is nothing to see. So I have to be active all the time, covering up.

Probably never in human history did we live in a society in which, at the microlevel of personal behavior, our lives were so strongly regulated.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

The problem for me is not that Schwarzenegger is governor, but the extent to which even politicians who are not actors are functioning like actors.

When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.

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

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

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.

Ideology today is unfreedom which you sincerely personally experience as freedom.

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

What if culture itself is nothing but a halt, a break, a respite, in the pursuit of barbarity?

In order effectively to liberate oneself from the grip of existing social reality, one should first renounce the transgressive fantasmatic supplement that attaches us to it.

We need useless theory more than ever today.

It is more satisfying to sacrifice oneself for the poor victim than to enable the other to overcome their victim status and perhaps become even more succesfull than ourselves

The force of universalism is in you Basques, not in the Spanish state.

It's bad if we are controlled, but if we're not, it can be even worse.

In Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.

We Slovenians are even better misers than you Scottish. You know how Scotland began? One of us Slovenians was spending too much money, so we put him on a boat and he landed in Scotland.

Fascism is relatively easy to explain. It is a reactionary phenomenon. Nazism was some bad guys having some bad ideas and unfortunately succeeding in realizing them.

You can be an extreme materialist, thinking that economic development ultimately determines everything; then you are truly ideological.

For me, ideology is defined only by how the coordinates of your meaningful experience of the world, and your place within society, relate to the basic tensions and antagonisms of social orders.

The more opera is dead, the more it flourishes.

Undoubtedly [Beethoven's] music often verges on kitsch

What we philosophers can do is just correct the questions.