“But this aura of an artificial menace was still necessary to conceal that they [Presidents] were no longer anything but the mannequins of power. Formerly, the king (also the god) had to die, therein lay his power. Today, he is miserably forced to feign death, in order to preserve the blessing of power. But it is lost.”

“It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.”

“To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.”

“What is a society without a heroic dimension?”

“A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.”

“Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.”

“The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.”

“Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.”

“There is no aphrodisiac like innocence”

“The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void.... That’s why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.”

“Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.”