The light has gone out of our lives... Yet I am wrong, for the light that shone in this country was no ordinary light... and a thousand years later that light will still be seen in this country and the world will see it... For that light represented the living truth.

Action itself, so long as I am convinced that it is right action, gives me satisfaction.

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.

Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.

The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.

Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.

Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world. This is as marvelous as being there in the beginning.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

All societies end up wearing masks.

Philosophy leads to death, sociology leads to suicide.

The neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone- remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygenic design- but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness.

This is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.

There is no aphrodisiac like innocence

Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory. Men have only had an unconscious since they lost a territory.

Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.

One has never said better how much "humanism", "normality", "quality of life" were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.

History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history.

Power floats like money, like language, like theory.

Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.

All of [the] activities here have a surreptitious end-of-the-world feel to them:... these joggers sleepwalking in the mist like shadow's who have escaped from Plato's cave

I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.

Hell of simulation, which is no longer one of torture, but of subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning...

Every woman is like a time-zone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night.

Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish-fulfillment

All we have left of liberty is an ad-man's illusion.

We need a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin to reassure us as to our ends, since ultimately we have never believed in them.

When you take away verisimilitude, you do not automatically find the veridical but, perhaps, the implausible.

Mass(age) is the message.

All contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event.

The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point.

Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.

Simultaneously, in the most complete ambiguity, they [media] propagate the brutal charm of the terrorist act, they are themselves terrorists, insofar as they themselves march to the tune of seduction.

It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable.

It is from the death of the social that socialism will emerge, as it is from the death of God that religions emerge.

I vote, I participate, I am present, I am concerned" - mirror of a paradoxical mockery, mirror of the indifference of all public signification.

Take your desires for reality!" can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power.

It is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).

[deconstruction and other French theories] was the gift of the French. They gave Americans a language they did not need. It was like the Statue of Liberty. Nobody needs French theory.

What one exorcises in this [imagery] way at little cost, and for the price of a few tears, will never in effect be reproduced

Forgetting extermination is part of extermination.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING AFTER THE ORGY?

There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. Appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism. This is where seduction begins.

The whole world thus becomes integrated as a spectacle into the domestic universe.

We are here to condemn the Palestinian occupation of the territories, but also to condemn the recent racist attack in France, against both Jews and Arabs.

Take your big stick, and your boyfriend, and go find a bus to catch.

You just have to take a little salt, and since I'm doing that it's, like, BOOM! In one week, I felt it kick in. All the commotion around me, all the water around me, moving left and right around me, became like a lake.

Believe me - I've done very good stuff and very crazy stuff, and I don't regret the crazy stuff.

In an action film you act in the action. If it's a dramatic film you act in the drama.

I'm lucky, because I started action movies at the age of 25. Now I'm 47, and I'm still kicking like a mule, and I'm as flexible as before.