Foucault, Michel

"Confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement."

"I am interested in the past only on one condition, that it should throw light on what is happening now."

"Language is a form of power."

"Reality has a kind of texture."

"The only way to be happy is to love as if it were not a sin."

"Work and love are the same thing."

"There is no universal truth, only historical truth."

"Knowledge is the only instrument of power that cannot be used against you by another."

"To be suspicious is to be modern."

"The beauty of a dream is that dreams remain the same even when circumstances change."

"One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to obtain the necessaries of life, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny."

"Madness is the absolute break with the work of mourning."

"Methods of punishment are not really about controlling the criminal; they are about controlling society."

"The body is not something that is given, it is something that is constructed."

"There is no culture without exchange and no exchange without difference."

"Sexuality is something that society produces through a complex interweaving of discourse, power, and knowledge."

"Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end."

"The subject is not something given in advance."

"Discourse is the power which is to be seized."

"What makes power hold good is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things."

"All those attempts to have power without sexuality, power without corporeality, are absurd."

"An intellectual is someone whose history, knowledge, relation to truth obliges him to speak."

"People always believe that the most absurd rumor."

"Madness is to absolute an Other to reason, an Other that can be come to know only in a moment of madness."

"The success of power is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms."

"I like the idea that there are always other forces at work than the ones we imagine we are controlling."

"What is the structure of the knowledge that could teach us something about the structure of consciousness?"

"Art is not meant to change anything. It is meant to provoke thought."

"The more someone belongs to the past, the more urgently he is needed in the present."

"Friendship is a fundamental form of human relationship that has been underappreciated by philosophy."