Philosophy Quote by Slavoj Žižek — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“We don't really want to get what we think that we want.”

“€7,500, first-class, everything—and all that for 40 minutes selling them some old stuff.”

“It is more satisfying to sacrifice oneself for the poor victim than to enable the other to overcome their victim status and perhaps become even more succesfull than ourselves”

“The more we live as 'free individuals' . . . the more we are effectively non-free, caught within the existing frame of possibilities--we have to be impelled or disturbed into freedom. . . . This paradox thoroughly pervades the form of subjectivity that characterizes 'permissive' liberal society. Since permissiveness and free choice are elevated into a supreme value, social control and domination can no longer appear as infringing on subjects' freedom: they have to appear as (and be sustained by) individuals experiencing themselves as free. There is a multitude of forms of this appearing of un-freedom in the guise of its opposite: in being deprived of universal healthcare, we are told that we are being given a new freedom of choice (to choose our healthcare provider); when we can no longer rely on long-term employment and are compelled to search for a new precarious job every couple of years, we are told that we are being given the opportunity to reinvent ourselves and discover our creative potential; when we have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we are now able to become 'entrepreneurs of the self," acting like a capitalist freely choosing how to invest the resources he possesses (or has borrowed). In education, health, travel . . . we are constantly bombarded by imposed 'free choices'; forced to make decisions for which we are mostly not qualified (or do not possess enough information), we increasingly experience our freedom as a burden that causes unbearable anxiety. Unable to break out of this vicious cycle alone, as isolated individuals--since the more we act freely the more we become enslaved by the system--we need to be 'awakened' from this 'dogmatic slumber' of fake freedom.”

“Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.”

“But truly, if I were not Alexander, I would be”

“إن ضيق أفق الإنسان الحديث يتجلّى أكثر ما يكون في اعتقاده بأنه لا يرى أمامه لُغزاً. كأن حكمته هي مجموع علمه وجهله معاً.”

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

“True siblings are bound together by far more essential things than blood, while more times than many blood isn't thicker than water.”

“It is hard to be angry when one has seen the sun rise,' she said.”