Slavoj Zizek Quotes

I do think that people have a desire to talk about issues they may have wanted to avoid before. I've never had so many random conversations with people where they're so ready to talk about race, gender, sexual identity, or things that are happening in politics.

I allowed Rick Santorum to express views and ideas that the American people never would have had expressed.

Some people say I'm too blunt and I'm too direct, too straightforward. I think we could use some of that in Washington, D.C.

When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, it becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues.

I think political correctness really does help us when it serves us but it doesn't help us when it silences us.

I think [there's] the opportunity for - I almost said President Clinton, and soon I will - but for Hillary Clinton to address that, and for the public sphere to address that in a way that they haven't. We started a conversation in the last few years on race that we desperately needed to have.

It's not necessarily a brave thing, people talk about what they think about. There's people out there who love to talk about politics or where they think the countries headed. I don't talk about that I talk about...things that are a little trippier.

They are people who, by and large, think the Administration's policy - and the Iranian case is a classic one - is very stupid. They can't get that view in, and so by talking to me, they accomplish something. It's a way of saying, this ought to be discussed, we got to get this out. That's a form of patriotism, in a funny way.

I think that any person who is commenting on public affairs is entitled to point out those dangers.

When you start talking about same-sex marriage, you start talking about abortion, and I think those issues are very very important and very interesting and very right for us to talk about, but when we allow those issues to cannibalize all other issues we find ourselves homeless while we debate about it.

There was one woman who had a giant sign and on it, it just said, 'America Is Better Than Abortion.' I think she meant that America was too good a place for the horror of abortion. But instead, it sounded like she had weighed both - the American spirit and getting an abortion and decided that American spirit better. I think it is a bad idea to have grammatically ambiguous protest signs.

Satire is used for political purposes all the time, but obviously there's a time and a place. I think in the current climate, it can be very difficult to speak your mind, but sometimes, I believe, we're all in danger and I think this discussion needs to be widened.

Bad jokes, and gay marriage are destroying this country - but torture can save it.

Our society covers these problems with a veil. All I want is an open discussion

I would rather put up with Rush Limbaugh and live in a country where we all do have freedom of speech.

When you hear someone delivering a divisive message, that's endangering our country that you stay up and say, you know, as an American, I do not think what you're saying is good and right. And if you do in a peaceful manner, you have every right.

[Barack Obama] says that he thinks America felt better, more confident, because Washington was not simply in a gridlock, in stasis, where nothing was being done. And he talks about that as a positive.

In a free and republican government, you cannot restrain the voice of the multitude. Every man will speak as he thinks, or, more properly, without thinking, and consequently will judge of effects without attending to their causes.

There is no doubt that the issue of race is always present in American politics and in the politics of any multiracial society. There is also no doubt that for some people it is an element in the manifested hostility to Obama. But I don't think it is the major theme at all. Obama is right when he reminds people: By the way, I was black before the election.

I don't think we live in a place where we don't want people to be able to say when they disagree with the president or incoming administration.

In order to have a society in which public issues can be openly and vigorously debated, it is not necessary to allow the brutalization of innocent victims.

When you have a president-elect who calls the press every name in the book, I think it's a warning shot across the bow, and you go back to what you learn when you were a child.

I don't think most of my opinions, political or social, are so far outside of the mainstream that they'd cause massive outrage on a scale liable to provoke death threats or referrals to prosecutors for outraging public decency, so why worry?

I think everybody focuses on race, but it's about a ton of things, and I just see these things as all interrelated and all interwoven in a weird way.

I'm just so amazed by people who are willing to share things that, in the past, no one would have ever talked about. Folks in popular culture being willing to take on issues, I think that is such a key part of having a culture shift and an institutional shift.