Raoul Vaneigem (Dutch pronunciation: [raːˈul vɑnˈɛi̯ɣəm]; born 1934) is a Belgian writer known for his 1967 book The Revolution of Everyday Life.
There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies.
The history of our times calls to mind those Walt Disney characters who rush madly over the edge of a cliff without seeing it, so that the power of their imagination keeps them suspended in mid-air; but as soon as they look down and see where they are, they fall.
To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.
People are bewitched into believing that time slips away, and this belief is the basis of time actually slipping away.
In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life.
People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure, but of the use to which they are.
Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.
Production and consumption are the nipples of modern society. Thus suckled, humanity grows in strength and beauty; rising standard of living, all modern conveniences, distractions of all kinds, culture for all, the comfort of your dreams.
Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out.
In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the
People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.
It is entirely up to us to invent our own lives.
Work is the opposite of creativity.
Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.
The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.
Purchasing power is a license to purchase power.
In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption.
I do not dream of a gentle revolution. My passion runs to the violence of supersession, the ferocity of a life that renounces nothing.
Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume; the hellish cycle is complete.
Daydreaming subverts the world.