Lost Interviews of Foucault:
"We suppressed madness and as a result came to know it. We suppressed foreign cultures and as a result came to know them."
"So if you will, my hypothesis is this: the universality of our knowledge has been acquired at the cost of exclusions, bans, denials, rejections, at the price of a kind of cruelty with regard to reality."
"Deep down what is the experience of drugs if not this: to erase limits, to reject divisions, to put away all prohibitions, and then ask oneself the question, what has become of knowledge? Do we then know something altogether other? Can we still know what we knew before the experience of drugs?...in this measure the experience of drugs isn't marginal in our society, it's not a sort of little deviance that does not count..."
"When humanity will actually be liberated from the system of constraint-- not only the systems of economic constraint, but the system of political, moral, cultural constraint, that capitalism has oppressed man with for centuries-- from the moment that liberation has been achieved, alors, what kind of knowledge will be possible?"
"The West has tried to build the figure of man in this way, and this image is in the process of disappearing. And so I don't say the things I say because they are what I think, but rather I say them with the end in mind of self-destruction, precisely to make sure they are no longer what I think. To be really certain that from now on, outside of me, they are going to live a life or die in such a way that I will not have to recognize myself in them."