Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also
 undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible
 to thwart it. In like manner, silence and secrecy are a shelter for
 power, anchoring its prohibitions; but they also loosen its hold and
 provide for relatively obscure areas of tolerance.

 It is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together.

 Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather
 consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority
 in relation to power.

 Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because
 it comes from everywhere.

 [P]ower is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial
 part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide
 its own mechanisms.

- Michel Foucault (1926-1984), The History of Sexuality Volume I

 In short, the history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of
 literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more
 discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the
 irruption of events in favour of stable structures.

 ...history, in its traditional form, undertook to 'memorise' the
 monuments of the past, transform them into documents, and lend speech
 to those traces which, in themselves, are often not verbal, or which
 say in silence something other than what they actually say; in our
 time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments.

-Michel Foucault (1926-1984), The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)