Politics is not what it pretends to be, the expression of a collective will. Politics breathes well only where this will is multiple, hesitant, confused, and obscure even to itself.

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.

You may fetter my leg, but Zeus himself cannot get the better of my free will.

Of all the views that are detached from reality, the most delusional is that Christians are persecuted in the U.S.

Humor in a relationship is so important. Many women will say that. Some say, 'If they can make you laugh, it's the sexiest thing on earth.'

No good government but what is republican... the very definition of a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men.'

Thought is impossible without words.

The characters are complicated. The people you think are bad, may not be so bad, and the ones you think are good, may not be so good.

I'm kind of a distractible guy.

[I normally go-to] whiskey on the rocks. Or a beer. Or with dinner, a glass of white wine.

A lawyer's job is to manipulate the skeletons in other people's closets.

Alpinism places unique demands on its practitioners.