All contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event.

— Jean Baudrillard

Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.

— Jean Baudrillard

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

— Jean Baudrillard

At the fourth, the fractal (or viral, or radiant) stage of value, there is no point of reference at all, and value radiates in all directions, occupying all interstices, without reference to anything whatsoever, by virtue of pure contiguity. At the fractal stage there is no longer any equivalence, whether natural or general. Properly speaking there is now no law of value, merely a sort of epidemic of value, a sort of general metastasis of value, a haphazard proliferation and dispersal of value. Indeed, we should really no longer speak of 'value' at all, for this kind of propagation or chain reaction makes all valuation possible.

— Jean Baudrillard

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.

— Jean Baudrillard

But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme power that is simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or does it volatilize itself in the simulacra that, alone, deploy their power and pomp of fascination - the visible machinery of icons substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God?

— Jean Baudrillard

Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.

— Jean Baudrillard

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

— Jean Baudrillard

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays costly tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

— Jean Baudrillard

Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.

— Jean Baudrillard