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

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.

From the point of view of wealth, there is no difference between need, comfort, and pleasure.

Islam, in the year 1978, was not the opium of the people precisely because it was the spirit of a world without spirit.

I’m not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.

Modern man is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets, and his hidden truth; he is a man who tries to invest himself.

I’m no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.

We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power.

My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.

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 else that you were not in the beginning.

Visibility is a trap.

The ‘Enlightenment, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.

It is meaningless to speak in the name of – or against – Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.

How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.

The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.

I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.

If an ignorant person is attracted by the things of the world, that is bad. But if a learned person is thus attracted, it is worse.

Into this error men have, probably, been led by viewing education in a false light; not considering it as the first step to form a being advancing gradually towards perfection; but only as a preparation for life.