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Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

— Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish (1977)

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More quotes by Michel Foucault

Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.

The Subject and Power (1982)

The gesture that divides madness is the constitutive one, not the science that grows up in the calm that returns after the division has been made.

History of Madness (1961)

Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought as a fish exists in water; that is, it ceases to breathe anywhere else.

One should try to locate power at the extreme of its exercise, where it is always less legal in character.

Above the punitive city hangs this iron spider; and the criminal who is to be thus crucified by the new law is parricide.

Discipline and Punish (1977)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Michel Foucault (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.