The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.

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.

Mother Earth reintroduced me to my people.

The devil is a bad devil.

Letter-writing on the part of a busy man or woman is the quintessence of generosity.

We do need great change in Burma. We are trying to build a new society, a society where basic human rights are respected, and where our people enjoy all the benefits of democratic institutions.

For people who have been raised on text-based interactions, just speaking on the telephone can be high bandwidth to the point of anxiety.

Fame itself is but an epitaph; as late, as false, as true.

I can't complain, but sometimes I still do.

Bleeding feet will bond us.

It is not about the pasture of the sheep, but about their wool. [Lat., Non est de pastu ovium quaestio, sed de lana.]

We can be serene even in the midst of calamities and, by our serenity, make others more tranquil.