Ethics Quotes

“A way of life can be shared among individuals of different ages, status, and social activity. It can yield intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized. It seems to me that a way of life can yield a culture and an ethics. To be "gay," I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual but to try and define and develop a way of life.”
― Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth

“The demand [exigence] for an identity," he insisted, "and the injunction to break that identity, both feel, in the same way abusive." Such demands are abusive because they assume in advance what one is, what one must do, what one always must be closed to, which side one must be on. He sought not so much to resist as to evade this installed dichotomy. One might say he refused the blackmail of having to choose between a unified, unchanging identity and a stance of perpetual and obligatory transgression. "One's way [façon] of no longer remaining the same," he wrote "is by definition, the most singular part of who I am.”
― Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth

“The demand [exigence] for an identity and the injunction to break that identity, both feel, in the same way abusive.”
― Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth