To punish is the most difficult thing there is. A society such as ours needs to question every aspect of punishment as it is practiced everywhere: in the army, the schools, the factories.

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.

The two old friends stood silently in the fading light, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at them. That they were old friends, I mean. Anyone could see it was getting dark.

Indeed, these people are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning.

Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.

A man who keeps on going; a man who keeps his eye on the ball.

Ballet is number one, everything else is scheduled in the small windows when I'm not in the studio taking class, rehearsing, on stage or on tour.

I wanted to do a political film that is as nonpartisan as can be, because I wanted to do a story that was American. I wanted to tell an American tragedy.

Regard a king as someone unconcerned with kingship.

Courtesy and good-humour are often found with little real worth.

We're not here to get over our humanness, but rather to accept and make peace with it... and to remember our Divine nature.

Surround your marriage with people who pull you toward your spouse.