25+ Fascinating Slavoj Zizek Quotes

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Department of Philosophy.

Žižek was born in Ljubljana, PR Slovenia, Yugoslavia, into a middle-class family.[14] His father Jože Žižek was an economist and civil servant from the region of Prekmurje in eastern Slovenia. His mother Vesna, a native of the Gorizia Hills in the Slovenian Littoral, was an accountant in a state enterprise. His parents were atheists. Žižek is a series editor of the Northwestern University Press series Diaeresis that publishes works that "deal not only with philosophy, but also will intervene at the levels of ideology critique, politics, and art theory".

Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do. Slavoj Zizek

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it. Slavoj Zizek

Communism will win. Slavoj Zizek

When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks. Slavoj Zizek

Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction. Slavoj Zizek

Liberal democracy - as you know, in the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today's left effectively offers global capitalism with a human face, more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not. Slavoj Zizek

Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures. Slavoj Zizek

True power does not need arrogance, a long beard and a barking voice. True power strangles you with silk ribbons, charm, and intelligence. Slavoj Zizek

An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard. Slavoj Zizek

Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire. Slavoj Zizek

We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. Slavoj Zizek

The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other. Slavoj Zizek

Ultimately,we hear things because we cannot see everything. Slavoj Zizek

I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it. Slavoj Zizek

Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana. Slavoj Zizek

My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions. Slavoj Zizek

Like love, ideology is blind, even if people caught up in it are not. Slavoj Zizek

If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them. Slavoj Zizek

The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire. Slavoj Zizek

Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots. Slavoj Zizek

Political issues are too serious to be left only to politicians. Slavoj Zizek

The true ethical test is not only the readiness to save the victims, but also - even more, perhaps - the ruthless dedication to annihilating those who made them victims. Slavoj Zizek

Money is precisely an object whose status depends on how we 'think' about it: if people no longer treat this piece of metal as money, if they no longer 'believe' in it as money, it no longer is money. Slavoj Zizek

If Stalin gives you a love advice, it has to succeed. Slavoj Zizek

Does everything that exists have to be grounded in sufficient reasons? Or are there things that somehow happen out of nowhere? Slavoj Zizek

Individuals reduced to the panic of mere survival are ideal subjects for the introduction of authoritarian power. Slavoj Zizek

The Christian motto 'All men are brothers', however, also means that those who do not accept brotherhood are not men. Slavoj Zizek

Art is not just a heightened procedure of providing sensual pleasures, but a medium of Truth;. Slavoj Zizek

A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end, for a pleasant death. Slavoj Zizek