RAOUL VANEIGEM

Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out.

What could I wish for the present but to take the greatest pleasure in being what I am?

Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete.

Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?

There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies.

The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.

We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.

As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.

The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself.

Work is the opposite of creativity.

It is entirely up to us to invent our own lives.

Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.

Ideally a book would have no order in it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.

In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption.

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power.

Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.

Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.

The key is within each of us. No instructions come with it.

People are bewitched into believing that time slips away, and this belief is the basis of time actually slipping away.

In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life.

Privative appropriation and domination are thus originally imposed and felt as a positive right, but in the form of a negative universality. Valid for everyone, justified in everyone's eyes by divine or natural law, the right of privative appropriation is objectified in a general illusion, in a universal transcendence, in an essential law under which everyone individually manages to tolerate the more or less narrow limits assigned to his right to live and to the conditions of life in general.

The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life.