Μ C > Μ's Quotes

“Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason

“...Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack.”
― Jacques Lacan

“You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from a lazar house, he becomes infuriated.”
― Michel Foucault

“Parents teach children discipline for two different, indeed diametrically opposed, reasons: to render the child submissive to them and to make him independent of them. Only a self-disciplined person can be obedient; and only such a person can be autonomous.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz

“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”
― Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals/On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns

“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

“In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity. ”
― Thomas Szasz

“Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.”
― Thomas Szasz

“Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz

“Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.”
― Thomas Szasz

“Suicide is a fundamental human right. This does not mean that it is desirable. It only means that society does not have the moral right to interfere, by force, with a persons decision to commit this act. The result is a far-reaching infantilization and dehumanization of the suicidal person.”
― Thomas Szasz

“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“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.”
― Michel Foucault

“...if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing”
― Michel Foucault

“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.”
― Michel Foucault

“But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.”
― Michel Foucault

“I'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.”
― Michel Foucault

“Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.”
― Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception

“Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 3: The Care of the Self

“It is pointless to ask: Why then is sex so secret? What is this force that so long reduced it to silence and has only recently relaxed its hold somewhat, allowing us to question it perhaps, but always in the context of and through its repression? In reality, this question, so often repeated nowadays, is but the recent form of a considerable affirmation and a secular prescription: there is where the truth is; go see if you can uncover it. [...] It is reasonable therefore to ask first of all: What is this injunction? Why this great chase after the truth of sex, the truth in sex?”
― Michel Foucault

“The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness”
― Michel Foucault

“The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 1, Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-1954

“Everything in the street today seems soft focus.”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.”
― Georges Bataille

“Each of us is incomplete compared to someone else - an animal's incomplete compared to a person... and a person compared to God, who is complete only to be imaginary.”
― Georges Bataille

“Indeed, we all know that the man who attentively contemplates a thing, who wants to see it as it is without changing anything, is 'absorbed,' so to speak, by this contemplation -- i.e., by this thing. He forgets himself, he thinks only about the thing being contemplates; he thinks neither about his contemplation, nor -- and even less -- about himself, his "I," his Selbst. The more he is conscious of the thing, the less he is conscious of himself. He may perhaps talk about the thing, but he will never talk about himself; in his discourse, the word 'I' will not occur.

For this word to appear, something other than purely passive contemplation, which only reveals Being, must also be present. And this other thing, according to Hegel, is Desire, Begierde....”
― Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit

“Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain”
― Marquis de Sade