
“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
Source: Simulacra and Simulation
Man and Language (1966)
Context: The more language is a living operation, the less we are aware of it. Thus it follows that from the forgetfulness of language that its real being consists in what is said in it. What is said in it constitutes the common world in which we live. … The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it — what is said.
“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
Source: Simulacra and Simulation
“The more we live with what we imagine others think of us, the less we live with truth.”
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 246
[199709051808.LAA01780@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997
“We actually create our own universe because we are all operating with our own private languages.”
Psychedelic Society (1984)
Context: The psychedelics are a red-hot social issue, ethical issue, whatever the term for it is, and it is precisely because they are a deconditioning agents: they will cast doubt in you if you are a Hasidic rabbi, a Marxist anthropologist, or an altar boy, because their business is to dissolve belief systems, and they do this very well and then they leave you with the raw datum of experience, what William James called in infants 'the blooming, buzzing experience.' And out of that you reconstruct the world, and you need to understand that it is a dialog where your decisions, the projection of your grammar onto the intellectual space in front of you, is going to gel into the mode of being. We actually create our own universe because we are all operating with our own private languages.
Turing Award Lecture "Form and Content in Computer Science" (1969), in Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery 17 (2) (April 1970)
“An awareness of death encourages us to live more intensely.”
In Davos, in an interview published on 23 January 2019. Bolsonaro Says Brazil Must Reform or Become Next Venezuela https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-23/brazil-leader-pledges-sweeping-reform-to-avoid-deeper-crisis. Bloomberg (23 January 2019).
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 160