75 Quotes by Raoul Vaneigem

My creativity, no matter how poor, is for me a far better guide than all the knowledge with which my head has been crammed. In the night of Power, its glimmer keeps the enemy forces at bay.

They spend their weeks waiting for Work to go put on its Sunday clothes.

First get to work; you can enjoy yourself afterwards! Such is the recurring, rhyming themesong that is passed down into the head, programming militarily the rhythm of the body’s movements. Such is, in its numbing insistance, the tune that orchestrates the retreat of nascent intelligence. And rest assured – it will be a different intelligence that ends up in charge over the frozen behavior of working hours, an intelligence in which heart counts the least and is petrified the most.

To talk of a modern work of art enduring is sillier than talking of the eternal values of Standard Oil.

Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.

Le travail est partout où l'on ne fait rien de sa vie.

Gazing upon the child, the presence in the adult’s heart of an unfinished life, oscillating between birth and death, is clarified.

The millions of human beings who were shot, tortured, starved, treated like animals and made the object of a conspiracy of ridicule, can sleep in peace in their communal graves, for at least the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to believe, on the strength of their daily dose of television, that they are happy and free. The Communards went down, fighting to the last, so that you too could qualify for a Caribbean cruise.

No more Guernicas, no more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin?