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.

Relations of power "are indissociable from a discourse of truth, and they can neither be established nor function unless a true discourse is produced, accumulated, put into circulation, and set to work. Power cannot be exercised unless a certain economy of discourses of truth functions in, on the basis of, and thanks to, that power."

There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying things.

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.

To work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before

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

'The prison' begins well before its doors. It begins as soon as you leave your house - and even before.