Quotes by Guy Debord

Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an authors phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.

Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.

The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive… compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.

There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.

The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.

He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with.

On ne peut opposer absraitement le spectacle et lactivité sociale effective.

Le spectacle est la reconstruction matérielle de lillusion religieuse.

Le spectacle est le mauvais rêve de la société moderne enchaînée, qui nexprime finalement que son désir de dormir. Le spectacle est le gardien de ce sommeil.

Partout où il y a représentation indépendante, le spectacle se reconstitue.

Il est le soleil qui ne se couche jamais sur lempire de la passivité moderne. Il recouvre toute la surface du monde et baigne indéfiniment dans sa propre gloire.

Il est ce qui échappe à lactivité des hommes, à la reconsidération et à la correction de leur œuvre.

Le spectacle est la principale production de la société actuelle.

Le but nest rien, le développement est tout. Le spectacle ne veut en venir à rien dautre quà lui-même.

Dont tout «avoir» effectif doit tirer son prestige immédiat et sa fonction dernière.

Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.

The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative.