I leave you the best phrases of Paul Michel Foucault (1926-1984), a philosopher, social thinker, of great influence in the social sciences and humanities who died in 1984.
A great critic of social institutions such as the prison or schools, he developed his idea of the 'Panopticon', a surveillance system where many are seen by someone who is not visible, from where control, power and knowledge are exercised.
You may also be interested in these phrases of philosophy.
-Power is everywhere, because it comes from everywhere.
-My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, that it is not exactly the same as bad.
-The soul is the prison of the body.
-Why should the lamp or the house be an object of art, but not our life?
-We are freer than we think.
-The whole of society persecutes each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
-Knowledge is not to know: knowledge is to cut.
-What surprises me is the fact that, in our society, art has become something that is related only to objects, and not to individuals or life.
-I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone different than you were at the beginning.
-Where there is power, there is resistance.
-Don't ask me who I am, or ask me to remain the same. More than one person, undoubtedly like me, writes in order not to have a face.
-Are the prisons overcrowded or is the population over-incarcerated?
-The look you see is the look that dominates.
-The panopticon is a machine for dissociating the idea of 'seeing -being seen': in the peripheral ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, everything is seen, without ever being seen.
-Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which resemble prisons?
-There is no power relationship without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute, at the same time, power relationships.
-People can tolerate two homosexuals they see going out together, but the next day they are smiling, holding hands, tenderly hugging each other, then they cannot be forgiven.
-Our society is not a society of entertainment, but of surveillance.
-Knowledge is not governed by a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice.
-As for the disciplinary power, it is exercised by making itself invisible; on the other hand, on those whom it submits, it imposes a mandatory principle of visibility.
-Death left its former tragic heaven and became the lyrical nucleus of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.
-There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying things.
-The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its negation or compensation; it grows between the signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and comments; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. That is the phenomenon of the library.
-Schools have the same social functioning as prisons and psychiatric institutions: define, control and regulate people.
-Look for what is good, strong and beautiful in your society, and develop from there. Push yourself out. Always build on what you already have. Then, you will know what you have to do.
-The prison is the only place where power can manifest itself in a naked way, in its most excessive dimensions, and justify itself as moral power.
-I'm not a prophet. My job is to create windows where there were only walls before.
-I'm madly in love with a memory. An echo from another time and another place.
-A body in poor health results in delirium, discouragement, bad humor, madness, to the point that the acquired knowledge ends up being thrown from the soul.
-Visibility is a trap.
-What desire can be contrary to nature, since it was given to man by nature itself?
-In reality, there are two kinds of utopias: the socialist proletarian utopias that enjoy the property of never being realized, and the capitalist utopias that, unfortunately, tend to be realized very frequently.
- I do not think that one has to be sad to be a militant, even if the very purpose that he is fighting is abominable.
-Don't ask who I am and don't ask me to remain the same: let our bureaucrats and our police see that our papers are in order. At least we avoid his morality when we write.
-In civilizations without ships, dreams run dry, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of pirates.
-The peculiar thing about modern societies is not that they gave sex to a mysterious existence, but that they dedicated themselves to talking about it to infinity, while they exploited it as if it were a secret.
-For the State to function as it does, it is necessary that there be, from man to woman or from adult to child, very specific relations of domination that have relative autonomy and their own configuration.
- It could be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.
-Nature, keeping only the useless secrets, had placed within the reach and sight of human beings, the things that were necessary to know.
-Globally, you can have the feeling that you hardly talk about sex. But a glance at the architectural devices, the disciplinary regulations and the entire internal organization is enough: sex is always present.
-The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.
-Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as a reaction caused by its hypocrisy; it is actually and directly perverse.
-Crime, with the hidden agents that it procures, as well as the generalized raking that it authorizes, constitutes a means of perpetual surveillance over the population: an apparatus that allows the control, through the criminals themselves, of the entire social field.
-There is not one, but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate the speeches.
-Wars are no longer fought in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are fought in the name of the existence of all; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of mass slaughter in the name of the imperative of life: slaughter has become vital.
-In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it a fixer within language; rather it is about creating a space in which the writer constantly disappears.
-One makes war to win, not because it is fair.
Madness, in its wild and indomitable word, proclaims its own meaning; in her chimeras, she utters her secret truth.
-Because the guilty person is only one of the objectives of the penalty. The punishment is aimed above all at others, at all potentially guilty.
-Justice must always question itself, just as society can only exist through the work it does on itself and on its institutions.
-The 'Enlightenment', which discovered freedoms, also invented disciplines.
-Policy is not what it claims to be: the expression of a collective will. Politics breathes well only when this will is multiple, hesitant, confused and obscure even to itself.
-When man displays the arbitrary character of his madness, he faces the dark necessity of the world; the animal that haunts its nightmares and its nights of deprivation is its own nature, which will expose naked, the implacable truth of its hell.
-Working is putting ourselves to think something different from what one has thought before.
-The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason on madness.
-There is no glory in the penalty.
-The lyricism of marginality can find inspiration in the image of the outlaw, the great social nomad.
-Starting from the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.
-What I am looking for is a permanent opening of possibilities.
-In any case, one thing is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant of the problems that have been raised for human knowledge.
-It does not make sense to speak 'on behalf of' or 'against' reason, truth or knowledge.
-The power of attorney is only acceptable on condition that it conceals a substantial part of it. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.
-In the mechanism of power there has been a strategic use of what was an inconvenience. Prison creates criminals, but criminals are ultimately useful in the economic domain and in the political domain. Criminals serve.
-There is little published information about prisons, it is one of the hidden regions of our social system, one of the darkest areas of our life.
-There are forms of oppression and domination that become invisible, one of them is the new normal.
-Knowledge is not part of human nature. Conflict, the result of combat and consequently chance, are what give rise to knowledge.
-As the archeology of thought has previously shown, man is a recent invention.
-The freedom of conscience bears more dangers than authority and absolutism.
-The discipline should not be identified with an apparatus or with an institution. It is a type of power that allows you to compress a set of instruments.
-The truth can be understood as a system of ordered procedures with the purpose of production, regulation, distribution and operation of statements.
-Success is always proportional to the ability to disguise their own mechanisms.
-The game can be worth it as long as we do not know what the end will be.
-My relationship with people is like that of an actor. When I finish speaking, I will feel a sense of total loneliness.
-Acid vapors do not contain the same properties as melancholy, while vapors that are alcoholic are always ready to burst into flames and suggest frenzy.
-The fascinating thing about prisons is that power is not usually covered or masked, but is revealed as the tyranny followed even in the smallest details.
-The relationship between writing and death is reflected in the fading of the individual characteristics of the writing subject.
-The mark of a writer is subjected to nothing more than the peculiarity of his absence.
-Life with humanity has ended with a dependent creature that is never in the right place. A living creature that is ultimately destined to wander and make endless mistakes.
-From a Christian point of view, human reason is insane compared to God's reason. However, divine reason appears as madness for human reason.
-In seventeenth century society, the body of kings was a metaphor in a political reality. The physical presence of the king was essential for the functioning of the monarchy.
- I believe that a great illusion is the social thought of a body constituted by the universality of the wills.
-The mastery and full consciousness of one's own body can only be acquired through the effect and transformation of power in the body.
-There are facades of evil that have great contagion power, such a scandal force that any publicity multiplies them infinitely.
-The isolation concealed for no reason, betrayed the shame it aroused and explicitly drew attention to madness.
-The madness reflects a secret of animality, which is nothing more than its own truth and in which, somehow, many purposes are reabsorbed.
-The difference only begins to exist in all its intensity on the day in which fear is no longer used as a method to stop a movement and is used as a punishment.
-Slower, but even more certain of the truth that confronts him, is the awakening that comes from wisdom itself and its insistent and imperative progress through the landscapes of madness.
-There are more ideas on the planet than academics imagine and, those ideas are more active, strong, resistant and more passionate than politicians think.
-The condition of the eventuality of power should not be sought in the primary existence of a central point or in a single space of sovereignty.
-Power is found in all places, it does not mean that it swallows everything, but that it comes from everywhere.
-The analysis of power relations is a complex area. Sometimes situations and states of domination are encountered, which instead of being mobile, allow participants to adopt strategies that modify them.
-The exercise of power creates and sprouts new objects of knowledge, allowing the accumulation of new bodies of information.
-The power constantly asks questions and asks us, inquires and registers constantly; it institutionalizes the search for truth, professionalizes and ultimately rewards it.
-It is the discourse of truth that decides in part, since it transmits and promotes the effects produced by power.
-They do not punish the same crimes, they do not punish the same kind of criminals. But they define well, each one, a certain penal style.
-Power is exercised in a network and, in it, individuals not only circulate, but are always in a position to suffer it and also to exercise it.
-The individual is an effect of power and, at the same time, to the extent that it is, is its relief: power passes through the individual that it has constituted.
-The public execution is now perceived as a focus in which violence is revived.
-It is ugly to be worthy of punishment, but inglorious to punish.
-The physical suffering, the pain of the body itself, are no longer the constitutive elements of the penalty. Punishment has gone from an art of unbearable sensations to an economy of suspended rights.
-The apparatus of punitive justice must now bite into this disembodied reality.
-The power does not stop questioning, questioning us; he does not stop investigating, registering; institutionalizes the search for truth, professionalizes it, rewards it.