188 Quotes by Slavoj Zizek

Political issues are too serious to be left only to politicians.

The same rightists who decades ago were shouting, 'Better dead than red!' are now often heard mumbling, 'Better red than eating hamburgers.

In this way the world market is, with regard to its immanent dynamic, 'a space in which everyone has once been a productive labourer, and in which labour has everywhere begun to price itself out of the system'.

Universality is a universality of 'strangers', of individuals reduces to the abyss of impenetrability in relation not only to others but also to themselves. [...] That's why the privileged way to reach a Neighbor is not that of empathy, of trying to understand them, but a disrespectful laughter which makes fun of them and us in our mutual lack of (self-)understanding (inclusive of 'racist' jokes)

Poverty does not simply mean to have little or no money; it is not reducible to the description of one's miserable circumstances

At this point we reach the supreme irony of how ideology functions today: it appears precisely as its own opposite, as a radical critique of ideological utopias.The predominant ideology today is not a positive vision of some utopian future but a cynical resignation, an acceptance of how 'the world really is’, accompanied by a warning that, if we want to change it (too much), only totalitarian horror can ensue.

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.