Paul Virilio Quotes

Science, which is not so attached to 'truth' as it once was, but more to immediate 'effectiveness', is now drifting towards a decline, it's civic fall from grace.

Some of the most dramatic consequences of the Kosovo war are linked to the resumption of the arms race and the suicidal political and economic policies of countries like India and Pakistan where tons of money are currently being spent on atomic weaponry. This is abhorrent!

We are entering a world where there won't be one but two realities, just like we have two eyes or hear bass and treble tones, just like we now have stereoscopy and stereophony: there will be two realities: the actual, and the virtual. Thus there is no simulation, but substitution. Reality has become symmetrical. The splitting of reality in two parts is a considerable event which goes far beyond simulation.

Cyberspace is an accident of the real. Virtual reality is the accident of reality itself.

I have always been interested in the architecture of war, as can be seen in Bunker Archeology. However, at the time that I did the research for that book, I was very young. My aim was to understand the notion of 'Total War'.

Globalization cannot take shape without the speed of light.

For example, we have developed an artistic and a literary culture. Nevertheless, the ideals of technological culture remain underdeveloped and therefore outside of popular culture and the practical ideals of democracy.

Earth is already being integrated into the Pentagon, and the man in the Pentagon is already piloting the world war - or the Gulf War - as if he were a captain whose huge boat would have become his own body. Thus the body simulates the relationship to the world.

What is accidented is reality.

Writing is not possible without images. Yet, images don't have to be descriptive; they can be concepts.

Today, the army only occupies the territory once the war is over.

The research on cyberspace is a quest for God. To be God. To be here and there.

Art is drama. Any relationship to art is also a relationship to death.

From the original watchtower through the anchored balloon to the reconnaissance aircraft and remote sensing-satellites, one and the same function has been indefinitely repeated, the eye's function being the function of a weapon.

The technologies of virtual reality are attempting to make us see from beneath, from inside, from behind... as if we were God.

The world and man are identical. This is why racism is the most stupid thing in the world.

Because Man is God, and God is Man, the world is nothing but the world of Man - or Woman.

World War Two was a world war in space. It spread from Europe to Japan, to the Soviet Union, etc. World War Two was quite different from World War One which was geographically limited to Europe. But in the case of the Gulf War, we are dealing with a war which is extremely local in space, but global in time, since it is the first 'live' war.

Look at the Intifadah in Jerusalem. One cannot understand that phenomenon, a phenomenon where people, often very young boys, are successfully harassing one of the best armies in the world, without appreciating their freedom to move!

Digital messages and images matter less than their instantaneous delivery; the shock effect always wins out over the consideration of the informational content.

One day the virtual world might win over the real world.

There is a French expression that says: to be exposed to an accident, to cross a street without looking at the cars means exposing oneself to be run over. This is more than a play with words, it's fundamental.

Newshounds are people with mini-video cameras, people who are continually taking pictures in the street and sending the tapes in to CNN. These Newshounds are a sort of pack of wolves, continually looking for quarry, but quarry in the form of images.

Television is a media of crisis, which means that television is a media of accidents.

For the US, GPS are a form of sovereignty! It is hardly surprising, then, that the EU has proposed its own GPS in order to be able to localize and to compete with the American GPS.

I believe that the politics of intervention and the Kosovo war prompted a fresh resumption of the arms race worldwide.

The simulator is the stage in-between television and virtual reality, a moment, a phase. The simulator is a moment that leads to cyberspace, that is to say, to the process because of which we now have two bottles instead of one. I might not see this virtual bottle, but I can feel it. It is settled within reality. This explains why the word virtual reality is more important than the word cyberspace, which is more poetic.

Television exposes the world to the accident. The world is exposed to accidents through television.

In a way, everybody is wounded from the wound of the real. This phenomenon is similar to madness. The mad person is wounded by his or her distorted relationship to the real.

There are three bombs. The first one is the atomic bomb, which disintegrates reality, the second one is the digital or computer bomb, which destroys the principle of reality itself - not the actual object - and rebuilds it, and finally the third bomb is the demographic one. Some experts have found out that in five thousand years from now, the weight of the population will be heavier than the weight of the planet. That means that humanity will constitute a planet of its own!

To regain our liberty (and our distance), we must slow the images down.

All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it...The great stroke of luck for the military class's terrorism is that no one recognizes it. People don't recognize the militarized part of their identity, of their consciousness.

To a materialist, matter is essential: a stone is a stone, a mountain is a mountain, water is water and earth is earth. As far as I am concerned, I am a materialist of the body, which means that the body is the basis of all my work.

The high level of the technologies used during the Gulf War makes this conflict quite unique, but the very process of de-realization of the war started in 1945. War occured in Kuwait, but it also occured on the screens of the entire world. The site of defeat or victory was not the ground, but the screen.

Resistance is always possible! But we must engage in resistance first of all by developing the idea of a technological culture.

The cinema was certainly an art, but television can't be, because it is the museum of accidents. In other words, its art is to be the site where all accidents happen. But that's its only art.

There cannot be an animal body without a territorial body: three bodies are grafted over each other: the territorial body - the planet, the social body - the couple, and the animal body - you and me. And technology splits this unity, leaving us without a sense of where we are. This, too, is de-realization.

When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution...Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.

As I have said many times before, the speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light. And it is nothing else!

People agree to say that it is rationality and science which have eliminated what is called magic and religion. But ultimately, the ironic outcome of this techno-scientific development is a renewed need for the idea of God.

There is, then, a link between the logistics of perception, the wars in Lebanon and the Gulf as well as with CNN and the Pentagon.

Moreover, it is clear that the era of the information bomb, the era of aerial warfare, the era of the RMA and global surveillance is also the era of the integral accident.

Now all we have to do to enter the realm of art is to take a car.

Let us start with the title of War and Cinema. The important part of the title is not War and Cinema.

It was a total and absolute surprise to find out that what was inside the concentration camps was a sea of skeletons. What is clear to me, therefore, is that while the tragedy of war grinds on, the contemporary aesthetics of the tragedy seem not only confused but, in some way, suspicious.

To someone like Zurbaran, who paints still lifes, lemons and pears are the objects of art. But to the electronics engineer who works on the technologies of virtual reality, the whole reality has become the object of art, with a possibility to substitute the virtual with the real.

The globally constituted accident can be compared to what people who work at the stock exchange call 'systemic risk'.

Many people question their religious identity today, not necessarily by thinking of converting to Judaism or to Islam: it's just that technologies seriously challenge the status of the human being. All technologies converge toward the same spot, they all lead to a Deus ex Machina, a machine-God.