# Quote — Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

> This legible lesson, this ritual recording, must be repeated as often as possible; the punishments must be a school rather than a festival; an ever-open book rather than a ceremony. The duration that makes the punishment effective for the guilty is also useful for the spectators. They must be able to consult at each moment the permanent lexicon of crime and punishment. A secret punishment is a punishment half wasted. Children should be allowed to come to the places where the penalty is being carried out; there they will attend their classes in civics. And grown men will periodically relearn the laws. Let us conceive of places of punishment as a Garden of the Laws that families would visit on Sundays.

- Author: [Michel Foucault](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michel-foucault.md)
- Book: [Discipline and Punish](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michel-foucault/discipline-and-punish.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault#Discipline_and_Punish_(1977)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/michel-foucault/discipline-and-punish/this-legible-lesson

## More from this book

> The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single haze to see everything constantly. A central point would be both the source of light illuminating everything, and a locus of convergence for everything that must be known: a perfect eye that nothing would escape and a centre towards which all gazes would be turned.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michel-foucault/discipline-and-punish/the-perfect-disciplinary.md)

> It was an important moment. The old partners of the spectacle of punishment, the body and the blood, gave way. A new character came of the scene, masked. It was the end of a certain kind of tragedy; comedy began, with shadow play, faceless voices, impalpable entities. The apparatus of punitive justice must now bite into this bodiless reality.

p. 17 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michel-foucault/discipline-and-punish/it-was-an-important.md)

> This dysfunction of power was related to a central excess: what might be called the monarchical 'super-power', which identified the right to punish with the personal power of the sovereign.

p. 80 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michel-foucault/discipline-and-punish/this-dysfunction-of-power.md)