Gilles Deleuze

It is not by means of a metaphor that a banking or stock-market transaction, a claim, a coupon, a credit, is able to arouse people who are not necessarily bankers. And what about the effects of money that grows, money that produces more money? There are socioeconomic "complexes" that are also veritable complexes of the unconscious, and that communicate a voluptuous wave from the top to the bottom of their hierarchy (the military-industrial complex). And ideology, Oedipus, and the phallus have nothing to do with this, because they depend on it rather than being its impetus. For it is a matter of flows, of stocks, of breaks in and fluctuations of flows; desire is present wherever something flows and runs, carrying along with it interested subjects__ut also drunken or slumbering subjects__oward lethal destinations.

Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy.

Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.

Literature is the power of fiction itself: not making a claim about what the world is, but about the imagination of a possible world.

In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.

The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?

Christianity taught us to see the eye of the lord looking down upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk figures and icons and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows. They bind us to other realities, and especially the reality of power as it subjugates us. Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile and obedient subjects.

If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.

A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.

You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.

Bring something incomprehensible into the world!

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

Here all guilt ceases, for it cannot cling to such flowers as these.

The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.

A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds.

The best one can hope for is a government favorable to certain claims and demands from the Left.

A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.

Morality consists in this for each individual: to attempt each time to extend its region of clear expression, to try to augment its amplitude, so as to produce a free act that expresses the most possible in one given condition or another. -- Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 73