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

Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete.

Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?

Ideally a book would have no order in it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.

Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power.

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

The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.

Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.

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

Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.

There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies.

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

In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption.

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

Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out.

We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.

It is entirely up to us to invent our own lives.

The key is within each of us. No instructions come with it.

What could I wish for the present but to take the greatest pleasure in being what I am?

Work is the opposite of creativity.

In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy equality before consumption fraternity in consumption and freedom through consumption.

Daydreaming subverts the world.

We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it controlling it thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.

The desire for liberty has also made itself felt as struggle against domestic tyranny or arbitrary rule.

I want the municipality to be a helping hand to the man with a desire of sympathy, to help the fallen when it is not in their power to help themselves.

A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows is one of the earliest as well as the keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man.

We have no desire to convince anyone that there is only one way by which faith can be acquired.

But the deep desire for peace remained with the American people.

I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.

It was also during my tenure of office that the Japanese Government agreed to the conclusion of a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and signed it, pursuing a policy in harmony with the avowed desire of the people.

'Tis very certain the desire of life prolongs it.

One of the things that has always motivated me to write is the desire to get it out and look at it in an objective way, so that it doesn't cause me any serious pain by staying inside.

In human history, the desire for revenge and the desire for loot have often been closely associated.

I see Canada as a country torn between a very northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and its desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch banker.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

The genius of the economic machine is in its ability to convert these indulgences into profitability. It converts desire into attention, a grip on our eyeballs and eardrums, which in turn can be marketed to advertisers.

I don't know what keeps me going. Sometimes I wonder... I think it's just pure perseverance and wanting to succeed and having that burning desire to always have success.

If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.

It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.

Let not a man do what his sense of right bids him not to do, nor desire what it forbids him to desire. This is sufficient. The skillful artist will not alter his measures for the sake of a stupid workman.

I was interested in telescopes and the way they worked because I had an intense desire to see what things looked like, so I learned how to use telescopes and find things in the sky.

When you do portraits professionally it's not a desire, it's for money.

My desire, my passion, was to help moms with practical encouragement.

Sometimes I'm uncomfortable with the level of fame I've got! It all depends on the day and what's going on. I don't desire any more fame. I don't need it.

This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.

Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.

The planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer... form the great body of the people of the United States, they are the bone and sinew of the country men who love liberty and desire nothing but equal rights and equal laws.