“It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.”
“Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.”
“Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.”
“Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.”
“Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.”
“Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.”
“There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.”
“Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.”
“In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.”
“At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.”