Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.

it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).

It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable.

What one exorcises in this [imagery] way at little cost, and for the price of a few tears, will never in effect be reproduced

To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have.

it is with this same imperialism that present-day simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation.

Each segment of the worm is directly reproduced as a whole worm, just as each cell of the American CEO can produce a new CEO.

There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. Appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism. This is where seduction begins.

Twins were deified, and sacrificed, in a more savage culture: hypersimilitude was equivalent to the murder of the original, and thus to a pure non-meaning.

All contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event.

We are fascinated by Ramses as Renaissance Christians were by the American Indians, those (human?) beings who had never known the word of Christ.

A truly happy person is he who is happy without any reason.

we all try to silence painful emotions. but when we succeed in feeling nothing we lose the only means we have of knowing what hurts us and why.

He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it or dismiss it.

In every community, there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart, there is the power to do it.

If you just keep your head down and just try and do your thing, sometimes magic happens.

When you usually are not ready to chance the standard you'll need to settle for the standard.

I have been unexpectedly confronted with my own mortality as I was told that I had cancer.

It is the same in love as in war; a fortress that parleys is half taken.

You probably wouldn't remember. I probably couldn't forget.

Prudence is but experience, which equal time equally bestows on all men in those things they equally apply themselves unto.