Probably never in human history did we live in a society in which, at the microlevel of personal behavior, our lives were so strongly regulated.

I am what you might call abstractly anti-capitalist. For instance, I am suspicious of the old leftists who focus all their hatred on the United States. What about Chinese neo-colonialism? Why are the left silent about that? When I say this, it annoys them, of course. Good!

A German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist «chaos» of the painting, asked Picasso: «Did you do this?» Picasso calmly replied: «No, you did this!»

We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

A typical guy who buys organic food doesn't really buy it in order to be healthy; he buys it to regain a kind of solidarity as the one who really cares about nature. He buys a certain ideological stance.

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

You can be an extreme materialist, thinking that economic development ultimately determines everything; then you are truly ideological.