Paul Virilio Quotes & Sayings

The thing about collaborators is that you don't know you are one whereas as a member of the resistance, you do. [In WWII,] the worst cases of collaboration weren't among the real collaborators, that official militia, but among the people at large, who were collaborators without knowing it, by a sort of laxity, an apathy. — Paul Virilio

While the human gaze becomes more and more fixed, losing some of its natural speed and sensitivity, photographic shots, on the contrary, become even faster. — Paul Virilio

Wealth is the hidden side of speed and speed the hidden side of wealth. — Paul Virilio

Images contaminate us like viruses. — Paul Virilio

Digital messages and images matter less than their instantaneous delivery; the shock effect always wins out over the consideration of the informational content. — Paul Virilio

When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution ... Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress. — Paul Virilio

To regain our liberty (and our distance), we must slow the images down. — Paul Virilio

There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We'll dream of being blind. — Paul Virilio

How can we live if there is no more here and everything is now? — Paul Virilio

All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it ... The great stroke of luck for the military class's terrorism is that no one recognizes it. People don't recognize the militarized part of their identity, of their consciousness. — Paul Virilio

The question today, then, is whether the world's populations are not close to having done with soft sciences and technologies, which still take into account the preservation of the planet and its inhabitants; whether they are not now in danger of being swept away by the terrorist excesses of a Laputian ratio, a universal philanoia attacking a human species which has become 'undesirable' in its entirety, the scandal of an Earth which is, so far as we know, the only biosphere in the solar system. — Paul Virilio

The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light. — Paul Virilio

How can we ultimately fail to twig that the apparent impiety of contemporary art is only ever the inverted image of sacred art, the reversal of the creator's initial question: why is there something instead of nothing? — Paul Virilio

Time is not something that can be measured with a pendule. Time is something that we build together within a tribe, a family, a region. — Paul Virilio

With the industrial proliferation of visual and audiovisual prostheses and unrestrained use of instantaneous-transmission equipment from earliest childhood onwards, we now routinely see the encoding of increasingly elaborate mental images together with a steady decline in retention rates and recall. In other words we are looking at the rapid collapse of mnemonic consolidation. This collapse seems only natural, if one remembers a contrario that seeing, and its spatio-temporal organization, precede gesture and speech and their coordination in knowing, recognizing, making known (as images of our thoughts), our thoughts themselves and cognitive functions, which are never ever passive. — Paul Virilio

The field of vision is comparable, for me, to the terrain of an archaeological dig. To see is to be on guard, to wait for what emerges from the background, without any name, without any particular interest: what was silent will speak, what is closed will open and will take on a voice. — Paul Virilio

The reconciliation of nothing and reality and the suspension of time and space by high velocities replace the exoticism of journeys with a vast expanse of emptiness. — Paul Virilio

Science, which is not so attached to 'truth' as it once was, ut more to immediate 'effectiveness', is now drifting towards a decline, it's civic fall from grace. — Paul Virilio

In industrialized warfare, where the representation of events outstripped the presentation of facts, the image was starting to gain sway over the object, time over space. Soon a conflict of strategic and political interpretation would ensue, with radio and then radar completing the picture. — Paul Virilio

Already, viral contamination offers an initial response to the question of the downside of electronic circuits, but another area of research beckons the area of ecological pollution. The pollution not only of air, water, and other substances, but also the unperceived pollution of distances. — Paul Virilio

The blinding Hiroshima flash ... literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things, so that every surface immediately became war's recording surface, its film. — Paul Virilio

There are no pessimists; there are only realists and liars. — Paul Virilio

War is cinema, and cinema is war — Paul Virilio

The contemporary sedentary is someone who feels at home everywhere, thanks to cellphones, and the nomad is someone who does not feel at home anywhere, someone who is excluded, ostracized. — Paul Virilio

War was my university. Everything has proceeded from there. — Paul Virilio

From the original watchtower through the anchored balloon to the reconnaissance aircraft and remote sensing-satellites, one and the same function has been indefinitely repeated, the eye's function being the function of a weapon. — Paul Virilio

Speed now illuminates reality whereas light once gave objects of the world their shape. — Paul Virilio