My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad.

There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.

We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them.

Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.

The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes.

On the level of investigative results, John Boswell's methodology has led to the discovery that what has been called the repression of homosexuality does not date back to Christianity properly speaking, but developed within the Christian era at a much later date. In this type of analysis it is important to be aware of the way in which people conceived of their own sexuality.