The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.

The gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates.

The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.

At every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, what one is.

Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.

But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.

The way people really think is not adequately analyzed by the universal categories of logic. Between social history and formal analyses of thought there is a path, a lane - maybe very narrow - which is the path of the historian of thought.