188 Quotes by Slavoj Zizek

"This is a deeply Christian idea: when I feel alone, abandoned by God, at that point I am like Christ on the cross, in full solidarity with him."

"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."

"It is easy for an academic to claim at a round table that we live in a post-ideological universe - the moment he visits the restroom after the heated discussion, he is again deep-knee in ideology."

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

"It's not the same thing: coffee without cream or coffee without milk.What you don't get is part of the identity of what you get."

"Not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person' is the very form of ideology, of its 'practical efficiency'."

"The only way to survive such shitty times, if you ask me, is to write and read big, fat books, you know? And I’m writing now another book on Hegelian dialectics, subjectivity, ontology, quantum physics and so on. That’s the only way to survive. Like Lenin. I will use his example. You know what Lenin did, in 1915, when World War I exploded? He went to Switzerland and started to read Hegel."

"Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than direct pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence: its violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals with their 'evil' intentions, but is purely 'objective,' systemic, anonymous--quite literally a conceptual violence, the violence of a Concept whose self-deployment rules and regulates social realty."

"[T]aking the Third into account does not bring us into the position of pragmatic consideration, of comparing different Others; the task is rather to learn to distinguish between "false" conflicts and the "true" conflict. For example, today's conflict between Western liberalism and religious fundamentalism is a "false" one, since it is based on the exclusion of the third term which is its "truth": the Leftist emancipatory position."

"We all know the classic scene in the cartoons: the cat reaches the precipice but goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under hits fee; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss."