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

Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.

The game is worthwhile in so far as we don’t know what will be the end.

The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratize popular justice then you give it the form of a court.

Death as the destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty words, the hollow jingle of a jester’s cap and bells.

We are entering the age of infinite examination and of compulsory objectification.

The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

Where there is power, there is resistance.

In civilizations without ships, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of corsairs.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.

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

There is no glory in punishing.

With humanity, life has ended up with a living creature that never quite finds itself in the right place, a living creature destined to wander and endlessly make mistakes.

I don’t write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.

It’s amazing how people like judging.

The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness.

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.

In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity – it is a prerequisite.

Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.

The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions.

Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.

The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.