Quotes from zizek slavoj

Why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than as problems of inequality, exploitation, or injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, rather than emancipation, political struggle, or even armed struggle?

I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.

Ideology today is unfreedom which you sincerely personally experience as freedom.

While just looking, we are always hunting among objects, looking for what we desire or fear, endeavoring to recognize some pattern; on the other hand, objects themselves always "stare back," vie for our attention, throw at us their lures and endeavor to entrap us.

Who dares to strike today, when having the security of a permanent job is itself becoming a privilege?

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

I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.

We need useless theory more than ever today.

What we philosophers can do is just correct the questions.

The horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things -- they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.

A German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist "chaos" of the painting, asked Picasso: "Did you do this?" Picasso calmly replied: "No, you did this!"

What if culture itself is nothing but a halt, a break, a respite, in the pursuit of barbarity?

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

Love is what makes sex more than masturbation. If there is no love even if you are really with a partner you masturbate with a partner.

Are we all not, when we sit in the cinema, in the position of humans in The Matrix, tied to chairs, immersed in the spectacle run by a machine? However, a more appropriate allegory is that of the viewer himself: beneath the illusion that we "just look" at the perceived objects from a safe distance, freely sliding along them, there is the reality of the innumerable ties that bind us to what we perceive.