"Why did this [Vietnam] war, so hard, so long, so ferocious, vanish from one day to the next as if by magic?Why did this American defeat (the largest reversal in the history of the USA) have no interna..."
- Jean Baudrillard
"The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject the real and the referential everywhere, to persuade us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy a..."
"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 l..."
"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 doe..."
"it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them)."
"It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable."
"What one exorcises in this [imagery] way at little cost, and for the price of a few tears, will never in effect be reproduced"
"To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have."
"it is with this same imperialism that present-day simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation."
"Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models..."