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

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

Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.

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

What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression

A way of life can be shared among individuals of different ages, status, and social activity. It can yield intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized. It seems to me that a way of life can yield a culture and an ethics. To be "gay," I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual but to try and define and develop a way of life.

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.