Slavoj Zizek Quotes

We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has.

Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It's a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people's minds. I'm talking about your language.

Words are also actions.

Words have power. The power to soothe. The power to skewer someone through the heart. The power to render someone speechless.

Words people say not only have a shelf life but have the ability to shape life.

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

There is no such thing as a dirty word. Nor is there a word so powerful, that it's going to send the listener to the lake of fire upon hearing it.

One must be careful with words. Words turn probabilities into facts and by sheer force of definition translate tendencies into habits.

Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.

Words can do wonderful things. They pound, purr. They can urge, they can wheedle, whip, whine. They can sing, sass, singe. They can churn, check, channelize. They can be a "Hup two three four." They can forge a fiery army of a hundred languid men.

I'm drawn to the magical efficacies of language as a political act.

Be careful with words, they're dangerous. Be wary of them. They begat either demons or angels. It's up to you to give life to one or the other. Be careful, I tell you, nothing is as dangerous as giving free rein to words

The older you get, the more power you have with language as a writer, which means that you have to be extra responsible for what you say, whether it's in print or in front of a microphone, because those words can go out and kill or go out and plant seeds for peace.

Words themselves are innocuous; it is the consensus that gives them true power.

For words are magical formulae. They leave finger marks be hind on the brain, which in the twinkling of an eye become the footprints of history. One ought to watch one' s every word.

But words are more powerful than anything.

Words are containers for power

Words are both better and worse than thoughts, they express them, and add to them; they give them power for good or evil; they start them on an endless flight, for instruction and comfort and blessing, or for injury and sorrow and ruin.

As an actor, no matter what, you're at the whim of so many other people all the time.

It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time

The West has never been all of the world that matters. The West has not been the only actor on the stage of modern history even at the peak of the West's power (and this peak has perhaps now already been passed)... It has not been the West that has been hit by the world; it has been the world that has been hit - and hit hard - by the West.

Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.

Words, as you well know, can be powerful. - Digger

Words are the litmus paper of the minds. If you find yourself in the power of someone who will use the word "commence" in cold blood, go somewhere else very quickly. But if they say "Enter", don't stop to pack.

Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. 'Love' is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.