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.
Michel FoucaultI'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.
Michel FoucaultTruth is not by nature free - nor error servile - but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.
Michel FoucaultEducation may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.
Michel FoucaultAt every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, what one is.
Michel FoucaultThe work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play).
Michel Foucault