Contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: It is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its own regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the type of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true.
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge
No paradox of contemporary politics is filled with a more poignant irony than the discrepancy between the efforts of well-meaning idealists who stubbornly insist on regarding as 'inalienable' those human rights, which are enjoyed only by citizens of the most prosperous and civilized countries, and the situation of the rightless themselves.
Hannah Arendt, "The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man" from Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt, "The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man" from Origins of Totalitarianism