Education Quote by Raoul Vaneigem

"Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not"

Raoul Vaneigem, Philosopher

About this Quote

Vaneigem pulls a neat trapdoor under the very idea of originality: if "everything has been said", the problem is not language but usage. The barb lands on the academic reflex to treat knowledge as a prestige commodity. He calls it "essentially banal" not because it is false, but because it has been domesticated - filed, footnoted, rendered safe. Facts and theories, once absorbed into institutions, lose their charge. They become the furniture of consensus.

The second sentence flips the insult into a dare. Knowledge, he argues, only becomes valuable in the presence of a mind "that is not" banal - a mind willing to metabolize the already-said into lived revolt, pleasure, or refusal. That is classic Situationist pressure: stop confusing interpretation with transformation. Vaneigem, writing out of the same ferment as May '68 and The Revolution of Everyday Life, treats culture as a machine for neutralizing desire. The system does not need to censor ideas if it can drown them in familiarity.

Subtext: the reader is implicated. If the world feels repetitive, it is partly because we keep using knowledge as decoration rather than leverage. Vaneigem is not mourning exhausted thought; he is mocking the timid consumption of it. The line is a rebuke to intellectual tourism and an endorsement of a more dangerous literacy - one that turns cliche into action, and makes "banal" knowledge combustible again.

Quote Details

Topic	Wisdom
Source	Help us find the source

More Quotes by Raoul Add to List

About the Author

Raoul Vaneigem (born March 21, 1934) is a Philosopher from Belgium.

16 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

"It has been a privilege to pursue knowledge for its own sake and to see how it might help mankind in more practical ways"

Paul Nurse, Scientist

"To-day it appears as though it may well be altogether abolished in the future as it has to some extent been mitigated in the past by the unceasing, and as it now appears, unlimited ascent of man to knowledge, and through knowledge to physical power and dominion over Nature"

Frederick Soddy, Scientist

"Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property"

Lawrence Lessig, Educator

"Without television and mass communication, that knowledge wouldn't exist. So I think it actually has the possibility of turning people into more understanding and more empathetic people"

John Warnock, Scientist

"Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement"

Peter Drucker, Businessman

Peter Drucker

"To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active"

Jean Piaget, Psychologist

"In the information society, nobody thinks. We expect to banish paper, but we actually banish thought"

Michael Crichton, Author

"It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning"

Claude Bernard, Psychologist

"I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem inasmuch as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right"

Henry Bessemer, Scientist

"The reason there's so much ignorance is that those who have it are so eager to share it"

Frank Howard Clark, Writer

"Each of us has been put on earth with the ability to do something well. We cheat ourselves and the world if we don't use that ability as best we can"

George Allen, Sr., Coach

"Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we've seen - the Internet - has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don't get in the way of this ideology"

Lawrence Lessig, Educator

"Naturally we are aware of the strength of our economy and naturally we don't want to downplay it"

Gerhard Schroder, Statesman

"There is a lot of stuff now that is in bad taste, and I don't see the necessity for it all. We didn't have to do it in our time, and they don't have to do it now"

Clint Walker, Actor

"It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know"

Friedrich August von Hayek, Economist

"The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it"

Dorothy L. Sayers, Author

"Let ignorance talk as it will, learning has its value"

Jean de La Fontaine, Poet

Jean de La Fontaine

"I think it's wrong that so many people pass on from this existence, and take all their knowledge with them"

Rex Hunt, Entertainer

"To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm"

Friedrich August von Hayek, Economist

"The fact that we're protected under that Constitution in exercising the right of free speech, it's a wonderful thing. You've got to come from somewhere else to realize how valuable it is"

Pat Oliphant, Cartoonist