Truth is not by nature free - nor error servile - but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.

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.

I can't believe how hard it is. The pain is indescribable. It's like I've been turned into sandstone and my insides are being slowly hollowed out by a chisel and mallet.

A very smart woman once told me that anger can feel like a life buoy, like it's the only thing keeping you afloat, but that in order to heal you have to let go.

Happy are those who choose, those who accept being chosen, the handsome heroes, the handsome saints, the perfect escapists.

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

Ladies and gentlemen, my mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you!

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

I'm not making any plans. I'm just going to let the universe surprise me.

One of the cool, chaste countries - Canada or Sweden.

We had the Vietnam War in the '60s, and there was a draft. The students didn't believe in it, and it unified them.

Solve global warming, eliminate the nuclear threat, and we will still have to confront the vastness of our species and the way it diminishes, without thinking, all the other species around it.