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.
Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit. [Entre l'amour et le vide-ordure automatique la jeunesse de tous les pays a fait son choix et préfère le vide-ordure.]
Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.
Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.
What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.
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.