One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge.

Political power goes much deeper than one suspects; there are centres and invisible, little-known points of support; its true resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn't expect it.

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

I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal and so on.

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

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

Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ?