Power Quotes

"Power that cannot be questioned becomes tyranny regardless of its institutional form."

"Power is always provisional."

"The phallus is the signifier of signifiers."

"There is no jouissance without the law."

"The Name-of-the-Father is the primary signifier."

"Domination works most effectively when it appears voluntary, when freedom itself is administered."

"The most insidious form of control is making people believe they are free."

"The subsumption of all human activity under exchange relations marks the completion of instrumental rationality."

"Domination becomes most complete when it is no longer experienced as domination but as natural reality."

"The administered society produces individuals who are simultaneously liberated and enslaved, free and determined."

"Power is everywhere and comes from everywhere."

"Where there is power, there is resistance."

"Language is a form of power."

"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."

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

"The study of sexuality is the study of power."

"The will to know is the will to power."

"The need which might resist the system is already suppressed by the system itself."

"All discourse creates a master."

"Desire is not a psychic energy; desire is purely affirmative."

"The body without organs is a limit to desire, not its realization."

"Control is not exercised through prohibition but through the normalization of desire."

"Every decision involves a kind of violence toward alternatives."

"The institution always betrays its own founding principle."

"Speech acts create social reality."

"Power is everywhere because it comes from everywhere."

"Authority is not something to reject out of hand but to analyze."

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