Michel Foucault

"We must imagine ourselves otherwise"

"The past is not dead; it continues to structure the present"

"Existence precedes any fixed nature"

"The key to culture is not the books we read, but the company we keep and the conversations we engage in."

"Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away. Power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations."

"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same; leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order."

"Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting."

"Man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge."

"The further one advances in life, the more one realizes that time is the primary capital of the human being."

"One has to give people time; one has to allow time for the growth of understanding."

"Thought is freedom in its essential form, but freedom of thought is a recent invention."

"Perhaps I owe a debt to the past, but I refuse to be imprisoned by it."

"The human subject is not a given thing. It is constituted, it is created through the systems of thought."

"To love is to want to speak and to be spoken to."

"Art is not about nature; art is about the intersection between nature and culture."

"There is no culture without critique, and no critique without culture."

"The only really effective way to counter false ideas is to speak the truth without fear."

"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 great event of the nineteenth century was not the Industrial Revolution but the revolution in the production of knowledge."

"We must be honest; there is no such thing as a natural order, only a constructed order that has become so familiar we mistake it for nature."

"Criticism should be practiced not as a judgment, but as a tool for change and transformation."

"Education is meant to free people, not to confine them within the boundaries of existing knowledge."

"The goal of my work has been to show people that a lot of things that seem natural to them have a history."

"Language does not speak for us; we are responsible for what we say through it."

"Every society has what it deserves in the way of intellectuals and artists."

"Sexuality is not something we inherit; it is something we create and recreate through our actions."

"The question is not how to liberate ourselves from sexuality, but how to live more fully within it."

"Modernity is not a period in history, but a manner of relating to contemporary reality."

"We must not reduce human beings to the status of rational calculators."

"The most important thing is to remain skeptical of what appears most obvious."