Slavoj Zizek, Best Way To Get Depressed

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

2.    What characterizes a really great thinker is that they misrecognize the basic dimension of their own breakthrough. 

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

4.    For Lacan, language is a gift as dangerous to humanity as the horse was to the Trojans: it offers itself to our use free of charge, but once we accept it, it colonizes us. 

5.    Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.  

6.    It’s not the same thing: coffee without cream or coffee without milk. What you don’t get is part of the identity of what you get. 

7.    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. 

8.    True love is precisely the […] move of forsaking the promise of Eternity itself for an imperfect individual. 

9.    We live in weird times in which we are compelled to behave as if we are free, so that the unsayable is not our freedom but the very fact of our servitude. 

10.    Populism is ultimately sustained by the frustrated exasperation of ordinary people, by the cry I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve just had enough of it! It cannot go on! It must stop! 

11.    The only choice is that between direct or indirect relations of domination and exploitation, with any alternative dismissed as utopian. 

12.    I have no physical fitness whatsoever. I don’t like sport. In my country skiing is popular. I find it nonsense. You climb a mountain and you slide down. Why not stay at the bottom and read a good book? 

13.    What if eternity is a sterile, impotent, lifeless domain of pure potentialities, which, in order fully to actualise itself, has to pass through temporal existence? 

14.    I have become more aggressive over time. Some say I am more right wing, which I am absolutely not. On the refugee crisis, we should drop the patronising “They are warm people.” No, there are murderers among them in the same way there are among us. The liberal left prohibit writing anything bad about refugees, which results in the anti-immigrant right monopolising. 

15.    I’m unable to have one-night stands. In my city, Ljubljana, you can tell exactly which women I’ve slept with, because I married them. 

16.    We’re not dreamers. We’re awaking from a dream turning into a nightmare. We’re not destroying anything. We’re watching the system destroy itself. 

17.    I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality.  

18.    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. 

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

20.    Writing saved my life. Years ago, because of some private love troubles, I was in a suicidal mood for a couple of weeks. I told myself: “I could kill myself, but I have a text to finish. First I will finish it, then I will kill myself.” Then there was another text, and so on and so on, and here I still am. 

21.    I think boredom is the beginning of every authentic act. (…) Boredom opens up the space, for new engagements. Without boredom, no creativity. If you are not bored, you just stupidly enjoy the situation in which you are. 

22.    Reality is for those who cannot face their dream.