Unreason is in the same relation to reason as dazzlement to the brightness of daylight 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.

But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.

As a magician you will miss the hundred percent of the applause if you don't perform.

To move in the forward direction is to be strong and positive enough to bury every negative experience in the past.

It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing.

Around the lunch table everyone seems to have given something up---dairy, meat, gluten, sugar, carbs. Only in a land of plenty could people voluntarily go without so much.

You like the wind? There is no wind? Start running! Create your own wind!

I think outsiders sometimes produce the best fictional perspectives on reality because they're set apart from it, so they have a unique view from the border.

One of them, for example, which will probably haunt me more than any other is the problem of communication.

If you can't be a hero, you can at least be funny while being a chicken.

The largest portion of our state budget is Health and Human Services. It will grow by approximately $500 million. A half a billion dollars is a very big number.