it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime

Methodologically speaking, the rejection by [John] Boswell of the categorical opposition between homosexual and heterosexual, which plays such a significant role in the way our culture conceives of homosexuality, represents an advance not only in scholarship but in cultural criticism as well.

We demand that sex speak the truth and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves wich we think we possess in our immediate consciousness.

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

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.

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

Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.