Gilles Deleuze quotes

A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments. [citation needed]. (Gilles Deleuze)
Nietzsche's break with Schopenhauer rests on precisely this point; it is a matter of knowing whether the will is unitary or multiple. View quote
Gilles Deleuze
There's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. View quote
Gilles Deleuze
Instead of gambling on the eternal impossibility of the revolution and on the fascist return of a war-machine in general, why not think that a new type of revolution is in the course of becoming possible, and that all kinds of mutating, living machines conduct wars, are combined and trace out a plane of consistance which undermines the plane of organization of the World and the States? View quote
Gilles Deleuze
Evaluations, in essence, are... ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate. View quote
Gilles Deleuze
One of the principal motifs of Nietzsche's work is that Kant had not carried out a true critique because he was not able to pose the problem of critique in terms of values. View quote
Gilles Deleuze
In order for music to free itself, it will have to pass over to the other side - there where territories tremble, where the structures collapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the great ritornelles that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return. View quote
Gilles Deleuze
When Nietzsche praises egoism it is always in an aggressive or polemical way, against the virtues, against the virtue of disinterestedness (Z III "Of the three evil things”). But in fact egoism is a bad interpretation of the will, just as atomism is a bad interpretation of force. In order for there to be egoism it is necessary for there to be an ego. View quote
Gilles Deleuze
It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in firs and starts . It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines- real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it. View quote
Gilles Deleuze
A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. View quote
Gilles Deleuze
The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities. (Gilles Deleuze)
Bring something incomprehensible into the world! View quote
Gilles Deleuze
The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation? View quote
Gilles Deleuze
You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies. View quote
Gilles Deleuze
Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come. View quote
Gilles Deleuze
It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity. View quote
Gilles Deleuze
The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write? View quote
Gilles Deleuze
There's no democratic state that's not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery. View quote
Gilles Deleuze
An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking. View quote
Gilles Deleuze
The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering. View quote
Gilles Deleuze
Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject. (Gilles Deleuze)
In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing. View quote
Gilles Deleuze
To affirm is not to bear, carry, or harness oneself to that which exists, but on the contrary to unburden, unharness, and set free that which lives. View quote
Gilles Deleuze
Philosophy is not in a state of external reflection on other domains, but in a state of active and internal alliance with them, and it is neither more abstract nor more difficult. View quote
Gilles Deleuze
Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object. View quote
Gilles Deleuze