Quotes About Society

Våre forfedre oppdro sine døtre til å oppføre seg bluferdig og fryktsomt (følelsene og driftene var de samme), vi oppdrar dem til selvsikkerhet - vi forstår oss ikke på det i det hele tatt. Det passer for de sarmatiske kvinnene som ikke har lov til å ligge med en mann før de egenhendig har drept en annen mann i krig.

man is the sole animal whose nudities offend his own companions, and the only one who, in his natural actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own kind

How strange it was to be inside a machine again! All his life he'd been inside machines, whether he realised it or not. Modern houses were machines. Shopping centres were machines. Schools. Cars. Trains. Cities. They were all sophisticated technological constructs, wired up with lights and motors. You switched them on, and didn't spare them a thought while they pampered you with unnatural services.

Men! Armchair heroes the lot of them, while women were sent out to do the dirty work.

People were so strange and sometimes you got tired just thinking about them.

El hombre no sólo vive de alta cultura.

Todos nosotros somos a la vez objeto de repugnancia y de envidia. Todos nosotros menos los muy pobres, los que sólo tienen por debajo de ellos el pozo séptico del infierno.

No desea que los hombres la consideren hermosa. Tal cosa sólo conduce a la infelicidad. Tampoco espera la admiración de otras mujeres; de ellas sólo espera una indiferencia cortés y un cotilleo rencoroso a sus espaldas.

The judges of normality are present everywhere. 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.

The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness

Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.

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

it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime

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

In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on on hand, the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby authorizing a relation only through the abstract universality of disease; on the other, the man of madness communicates with society only by the intermediary of an equally abstract reason which is order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the requirements of conformity.

everything is dangerous, nothing is innocent

For was this transformation of sex into discourse not governed by the endeavor to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction: to say no to unproductive activities, to banish casual pleasures, to reduce or exclude practices whose object was not procreation?

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

History is one way in which a society recognizes and develops a mass of documentation with which it is inextricably linked.

Liberty, far from putting man in possession of himself, ceaselessly alienates him from his essence and his world

The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.

It may well be that we talk about sex more than anything else; we set our minds to the task; we convince ourselves that were have never said enough on the subject...where sex is concerned the most long-winded, the most impatient of societies is our own.

En una sociedad como la nuestra son bien conocidos los procedimientos de exclusión. El más evidente, y el más familiar también, es lo prohibido.

Le droit de punir a été déplacé de la vengeance du souverain à la défense de la société.