Raoul Vaneigem Quotes

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

- Raoul Vaneigem

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

- Raoul Vaneigem

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

- Raoul Vaneigem

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.

- Raoul Vaneigem

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.

- Raoul Vaneigem

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.

- Raoul Vaneigem

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.

- Raoul Vaneigem

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

- Raoul Vaneigem

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

- Raoul Vaneigem

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

- Raoul Vaneigem

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power.

- Raoul Vaneigem

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.

- Raoul Vaneigem

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

- Raoul Vaneigem

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

- Raoul Vaneigem

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

- Raoul Vaneigem

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

- Raoul Vaneigem

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

- Raoul Vaneigem

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

- Raoul Vaneigem

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

- Raoul Vaneigem

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

- Raoul Vaneigem

Work is the opposite of creativity.

- Raoul Vaneigem