Michel Foucault

The problem of Islam as a political force is an essential one for our time and for the years to come, and we cannot approach it with a modicum of intelligence if we start out from a position of hatred.

My hypothesis is not so much that the court is the natural expression of popular justice, but rather that its historical function is to ensnare it, to control it and strangle it, by re-inscribing it within institutions which are typical of a state apparatus.

Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.

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.

In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.

The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.

What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

For the bourgeoisie, the main danger against which it had to be protected, that which had to be avoided at all costs, was armed uprising, was the armed people, was the workers taking to the streets in an assault against the government.

The history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the irruption of events in favor of stable structures.

We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the 'social-worker'-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements.

In political and social analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king.