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The thing about collaborators is that you don’t know you are one whereas as a member of the resistance, you do. [In WWII,] the worst cases of collaboration weren’t among the real collaborators, that official militia, but among the people at large, who were collaborators without knowing it, by a sort of laxity, an apathy.

— Paul Virilio Pure War (2008)

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Notes from Wikiquote

Conversation in 1995 with Friedrich Kittler.

More quotes by Paul Virilio

Wealth is the hidden side of speed and speed the hidden side of wealth.

In World War Two, the worst cases of collaboration weren’t among the real collaborators, that official Militia, but among the people at large, who were collaborators without knowing it, by a sort of laxity, an apathy.

Pure War (2008)

When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution... Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.

All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it…The great stroke of luck for the military class’s terrorism is that no one recognizes it. People don’t recognize the militarized part of their identity, of their consciousness.

It may seem like a paradox: while futurism, the singer of modernity, was able to perceive and intuit the power of cinema on theoretical and poetical levels, it did not manage to use the new means of expression as a weapon – nor did it appropriate cinema as the art form of all times.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Paul Virilio (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.