Slavoj Zizek Quotes

The Social Sciences will concern themselves with the rationalization of social control... the control of human behavior.

Modesty forbids what the law does not.

Society just has a way of inhibiting you, which is good and bad.

Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical. He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, he becomes polite.

Public behavior is merely private character writ large.

The attempt to regulate, control, and prescribe all manner of conduct and social relations is very old. It was always the practice of primitive peoples.

Treat 'em like dogs, and you'll have dogs' works and dogs' actions. Treat 'em like men, and you'll have men's works.

Marriage is the most licentious of human institutions.

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

Public lives are lived out on the job and in the marketplace, where certain rules, conventions, laws, and social customs keep most of us in line. Private lives are lived out in the presence of family, friends, and neighbors who must be considered and respected even though the rules and proscriptions are looser than what's allowed in public. But in our secret lives, inside our own heads, almost anything goes.

People say when you're in love, you don't need etiquette. Well, you need it then more than anything. Or they say, "At home I can just be myself." What they mean is they can be their worst selves... They always mean they will save all their anxiety about how to behave for somebody like the head waiter of a restaurant, someone they'll never see again.

It's not illegal to be an asshole.

A man reveals his character even in the simplest things he does.

There is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual.

You can't go into the office and be a jerk. You can't yell at your kids or your wife or your husband for no reason. That makes you a terrible person.

There can be no freedom in the large sense of the word, no harmonious development, so long as mercenary and commercial considerations play an important part in the determination of personal conduct.

I think it's important to see the parallels, and to understand that our masculine and feminine roles are relatively new in human history. Both gender and race are inventions that go deep because we have been raised with them, but they are still inventions.

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.

I think religion might throw up a kind of resistance, but I think if one talks about conditioning we can all kind of understand that.

We make a big mistake when we conclude that the law is the answer to bad behavior. In fact, the law alone stirs up more of such behavior. People get worse, not better, when you lay down the law. To be sure, the Spirit does use both God's law and God's gospel in our sanctification. But the law and the gospel do very different things.

All of us celebrate our values in our behavior.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky. It is the prohibition that makes anything precious.

I am trying for nothing so hard in my own personal life as how not to be respectable when married.

Tangier is one of the few places left in the world where, so long as you don't proceed to robbery, violence, or some form of crude, antisocial behavior, you can do exactly what you want.

People can get crazier as they get older. I can just be weird whenever I want, and there's the freedom of not caring what people think.