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"Our concept of human nature is certainly limited; it's partially socially conditioned, constrained by our own character defects and the limitations of the intellectual culture in which we exist. Yet at the same time it is of critical importance that we know what impossible goals we're trying to achieve, if we hope to achieve some of the possible goals. And that means that we have to be bold enough to speculate and create social theories on the basis of partial knowledge, while remaining very open to the strong possibility, and in fact overwhelming probability, that at lease in some respects we're very far off the mark."

"It is not true in our given society that all people are doing useful, productive work, or self-satisfying work - obviously that's very far from true - or that, if they were to do the kind of work they're doing under conditions of freedom, it would thereby become productive and satisfying.
Rather there are a very large number of people who are involved in other kinds of work. For example, the people who are involved in the management of exploitation, or the people who are involved in the creation of artificial consumption, or the people who are involved in the creation of mechanisms of destruction and oppression, or the people who are simply not given any place in a stagnating industrial economy. Lots of people are excluded from the possibility of productive labor."

- both from Noam Chomsky during the The Chomsky-Foucault debate, a live discussion/interview by Fons Elders, on Dutch television in November 1971.