"Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people."
"I wasn't always smart, I was actually very stupid in school [T]here was a boy who was very attractive who was even stupider than I was. And in order to ingratiate myself with this boy who was very beautiful, I began to do his homework for him – and that's how I became smart, I had to do all this work to just keep ahead of him a little bit, in order to help him. In a sense, all the rest of my life I've been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys."
17 likes
Source: Michel Foucault (2012). “The History of Sexuality: An Introduction”, p.27, 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"