Quotes About Authority

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.

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

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

In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.

There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze that each individual under its weight will end by [internalising] to the point that they are their own overseer, each individual thus exercising surveillance over, and against themself.

there is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present constituting that very thing which one attempts to counter it with.

And the good ruler is precisely the one who exercises his power as it ought to be exercised, that is, simultaneously exercising his power over himself. And it is the power over oneself that thus regulates one's power over others.

The manifest discourse, therefore, is really no more than the repressive presence of what it does not say; and this 'not-said' is a hollow that undermines from within all that is said.

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 such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

Le supplice ne rétablissait pas la justice, il réactivait le pouvoir.

Under the authority of a language that had been carefully expurgated so that it was no longer directly named, sex was taken charge of, tracked down as it were, by a discourse that aimed to allow it no obscurity, no respite.

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

We have to rise up against all forms of power—but not just power in the narrow sense of the word, referring to the power of a government or of one social group over another: these are only a few particular instances of power. Power is anything that tends to render immobile and untouchable those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good.

Government is the right disposition of things.

The punishment must proceed from the crime; the law must appear to be a necessity of things, and power must act while concealing itself beneath the gentle force of nature.

one exists only when fixed in definite relations of domination ...

How could the disciplines and the power that functions in them appear arbitrary, when they merely operate the mechanisms of justice itself, even with a view to mitigating their intensity?

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

In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king... we must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code.

templanza es representada con toda regularidad entre las cualidades que pertenecen —o por lo menos deberían pertenecer— no a cualquiera, sino en forma privilegiada a aquellos que tienen rango, posición y responsabilidad en la ciudad.

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

Sand???m?zdan çok daha az Yunanl?y?z. Ne tiyatro basamaklar?n?n ne de sahnenin üzerindeyiz; bizzat yönlendirdiÄŸimiz -çünkü onun bir çark?y?z- onun iktidar etkileri taraf?ndan kuÅŸat?lm?? olarak, Panopticon makinesinin içindeyiz.