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

Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.

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.

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

Search for what is good and strong and beautiful in your society and elaborate from there. Push outward. Always create from what you already have. Then you will know what to do.

From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.

Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ?

I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.

Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.

There is something about hearing your president affirm your humanity that you don't know what effect it has until you hear it.

My grandmother sang, too, and she was really loud. It was this wild kind of singing. I count her among my influences.

Keep you enemies in front of you.

As each layer of shadow is mined from the darkness, as each fear is faced and each projection reclaimed, the gold shines through.

I always have dashi in my refrigerator—it's the almighty Japanese ingredient.

The iconoclastic mode, that specific mode of language, there is an element of it that it is punk - that is confrontational. That's just a part of the language of jazz - at a certain point.

Loyalty is a feature in a boy's character that inspires boundless hope.

I think my idea of retirement might be to one day work a 40-hour week.

Treason seldom dwells with courage.

It is not your aptitude, but your attitude, that determines your altitude.