Foucault, Michel

"I am interested in the way that we understand ourselves, the way we are invited to understand ourselves."

"What is the self but a collection of effects produced by our cultural moment?"

"Intellectuals are responsible for the ideas they produce and the effects of those ideas."

"The modern state is not natural; it is a historical construction."

"We must analyze consciousness as the effect of complex power relations."

"Language always goes beyond what it says."

"The more one deciphers the text of experience, the more one realizes the limits of interpretation."

"A person cannot be perceived the way a landscape is perceived."

"We are not fighting against desire; we are fighting against the apparatus that uses desire."

"The body is a historical construct, not a natural given."

"One should not speak about the past but with the past."

"What matters is not the content of knowledge but the form of power it contains."

"Resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power."

"Every intellectual is a bearer of discourse that has political consequences."

"The self is written into history, not discovered beneath it."

"What if we started by trying to understand systems rather than individuals?"

"Genealogy is not about finding origins but about showing how things became what they are."

"To be free is to know what you are doing."

"Silence is complicity with the mechanisms of control."

"The archive is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements."

"One must think against oneself in order to think at all."

"What we call the soul is an effect of power working on the body."

"Discourse is not simply that which translates struggles or systems of domination, but is the thing for which and by which there is struggle."

"The question is: what are we willing to do to become free?"

"Knowledge about sexuality is never innocent; it is always bound to power."

"To analyze is to show the historical contingency of what seems necessary."

"We must recognize that we ourselves are the sites where power operates."

"Every statement is an act with consequences."

"The past is not dead; it continues to structure the present in invisible ways."

"What if the duty of the intellectual is to say what others prefer not to hear?"