Quote collection
188 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us."
"One cannot attend to oneself, take care of oneself, without a relationship to another person."
"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same."
"As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end."
"The gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates."
"Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?"
"What I seek is a permanent opening of possibilities."
"Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting."
"Why shouldn't I be interested in politics? That is to say, what blindness, what deafness, what density of ideology would have to weigh me down to prevent me from being interested in what is probably the most crucial subject to our existence, that is to say the society in which we live, the economic relations within which it functions, and the system of power which defines the regular forms and the regular permissions and prohibitions of our conduct. The essence of our life consists, after all, of the political functioning of the society in which we find ourselves."
"Domination is not that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over others, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society."
"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, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest."
"Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are."
"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face."
"There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think."
"Power is everywhere...because it comes from everywhere."
"... we are obliged to produce the truth by the power that demands truth and needs it in order to function: we are constrained, we are condemned to admit the truth or to discover it. Power constantly asks questions and questions us; it constantly investigates and records; it institutionalizes the search for the truth, professionalizes it, and rewards it. ... In a different sense, we are also subject to the truth in the sense that truth lays down the law: it is the discourse of truth that decides, at least in part; it conveys and propels effects of power."
"If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost."
"Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy into a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species."
"My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad."
"Total surveillance is increasingly the general condition of society as a whole."