The collection / 9 fragments

The living archive

Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

The millions of human beings who were shot, tortured, starved, treated like animals and made the object of a conspiracy of ridicule, can sleep in peace in their communal graves, for at least the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to believe, on the strength of their daily dose of television, that they are happy and free. The Communards went down, fighting to the last, so that you too could qualify for a Caribbean cruise.

Raoul Vaneigem / quote

02Undated

To talk of a modern work of art enduring is sillier than talking of the eternal values of Standard Oil.

Raoul Vaneigem / quote

03Undated

Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.

Raoul Vaneigem / quote

04Undated

My creativity, no matter how poor, is for me a far better guide than all the knowledge with which my head has been crammed. In the night of Power, its glimmer keeps the enemy forces at bay.

Raoul Vaneigem / quote

05Undated

No more Guernicas, no more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin?

Raoul Vaneigem / quote

06Undated

We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.

Raoul Vaneigem / quote

07Undated

In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption.

Raoul Vaneigem / quote

08Undated

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power.

Raoul Vaneigem / quote

09Undated

The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.

Raoul Vaneigem / quote