Michel Foucault Quotes

If there are people who act outside the law, then the state must use legal means to impose law in the interests of majority. That's the way it's done in the U.S., and that's the way it's done in Russia.

Mob rule can not be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.

We see North Koreans as automatons, goose-steeping at parades, doing mass gymnastics with fixed smiles on their faces - but beneath all that, real life goes on with the same complexity of human emotion as anywhere else.

Justice is the object of government, and those who support the government, must be agreed as to the justice to be executed by it, or they cannot rightfully unite in maintaining the government itself.

For two decades the state has been taking liberties, and these liberties were once ours.

The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in power.

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

China has not established the rule of law and if there is a power above the law there is no social justice. Everybody can be subjected to harm. I'm just a citizen: my life is equal in value to any other. But I'm thankful that when I lost my freedom so many people shared feelings and put such touching effort into helping me.

The bottom line is that we cannot sit idle as unparalleled rules and regulations significantly restrict our rights and ability to care for our families.

The Supreme Court is a menace to the welfare of the nation.

Day by day, case by case, the Supreme Court is designing a constitution for a country that I do not recognize.

The state is an instrument in the hands of the ruling class for suppressing the resistance of its class enemies.

What is crime among the multitude is only vice among the few.

The law does not content itself with classifying and punishing crime. It invents crime.

What is going to rule our great commonwealth, the mob or the law?

Justice in this country is an insurance policy. It’s not something that we’re supposed to get sometimes.

The more laws the more offenders

Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them.

The worst crime of any type of state is just that it always tries to force the rich diversity of social life into definite forms and adjust it to one particular form

The absorption of all social functions by the State necessarily favored the development of an unbridled, narrow-minded, individualism.

The absolute justice of the State, enlightened by the perfect reason of the State. That is law.

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.

Justice is a commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.

The law must have the last word.

We still leave unblotted in the leaves of our statute book, for the reverence and admiration of successive ages, the just and wholesome law which declares that the sturdy felon shall be fed and clothed, and that the penniless debtor shall be left to die of starvation and nakedness. This is no fiction.