Slavoj Zizek

Thinking begins when you ask really difficult questions.

Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.

Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.

The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.

It's bad if we are controlled, but if we're not, it can be even worse.

Who dares to strike today, when having the security of a permanent job is itself becoming a privilege?

What if the way we perceive a problem is already part of the problem?

We're not dreamers. We're awaking from a dream turning into a nightmare. We're not destroying anything. We're watching the system destroy itself.

You cannot change people but you can change the system so that people are not pushed into doing evil things.

There is an old joke about socialism as the synthesis of the highest achievements of the whole human history to date: from prehistoric societies it took primitivism; from the Ancient world it took slavery; from medieval society brutal domination; from capitalism exploitation; and from socialism the name..

The experience that we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is fundamentally a lie – the truth lies outside, in what we do.

If we only change reality in order to realise our dreams, and do not change these dreams themselves, sooner or later we regress back to the old reality.

I often say, 'I'm a communist, but I drive a Mercedes.' It's not a joke, it's a statement about our predicament.

The only way to be a true communist is to be a capitalist, because you need to understand capitalism from within.

I'm not a postmodernist. I'm a pre-modernist who has seen the future and decided to go back.

I don't think. I just write. And then I read what I wrote and I say, 'Ah, that's what I think!'

My philosophy is basically about how to be a communist without being a Stalinist or a liberal.

I'm a pessimist, but I'm an optimistic pessimist. I believe things will go wrong, but I'm happy about it.

When you are in love, you are crazy. When you are not in love, you are even crazier.

If you are not confused, you are not thinking clearly.