"Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people."
"And more than once in the course of time, the same theme reappears: among the mystics of the fifteenth century, it has become the motif of the soul as a skiff, abandoned on the infinite sea of desires, in the sterile field of cares and ignorance, among the mirages of knowledge, amid the unreason of the world - a craft at the mercy of the sea's great madness, unless it throws out a solid anchor, faith, or raises its spiritual sails so that the breath of God may bring it to port."
6 likes
Source: Michel Foucault (2013). “Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason”, p.12, Vintage
About the author
Same author
More quotes by Michel Foucault
"I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning."
"People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does."
"'Truth' is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of truth."
"Where there is power, there is resistance."
"There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations"