Michel Foucault
“The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one's sex, but, rather, to use one's sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships.”
“There has been an inversion in the hierarchy of the two principles of antiquity, 'Take care of yourself' and 'Know yourself.'”
“I'm very proud that some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students.”
“It is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order; it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies.”
“Discipline 'makes' individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise.”
“Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth.”
“There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine.”
“We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.”
“My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad.”
“A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions the practices that we accept rest.”
“I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.”
“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”
“Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.”
“The soul is the prison of the body.”
“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.”
“Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.”
“Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which is all the less easy to perceive in that it is everywhere and always.”
“The judges of normality are present everywhere.”
“We should try to discover who we are and refuse what we are.”
“The strategic adversary is fascism… the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior.”