To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.

We have a world of pleasure to win, and nothing to lose but boredom.

As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.

The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself.

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power. The old proletariat sold its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time it had was passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology.

In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life.