Michel Foucault Quotes
Top 73 wise famous quotes and sayings by Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Michel Foucault on Wise Famous Quotes.
In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of pirates
Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history
Power is tolerable only on condition that it masks a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to an ability to hide its own mechanisms.
Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning; in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth.
Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.
I'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.
This knowledge, so inaccessible, so formidable, the Fool, in his innocent idiocy, already possesses.
It is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime
As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
There is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present constituting that very thing which one attempts to counter it with.
Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments.
The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.
Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.
From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.
Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.
madness is the false punishment of a false solution, but by its own virtue it brings to light the real problem, which can then be truly resolved.
Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.
One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge.
In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.
Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.
Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.
People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.
Religion for them [Iranians] was like a promise and guarantee of finding something that would radically change their subjectivity
We must escape and help others to escape the two readymade formulas of the pure sexual encounter and the lovers' fusion of identities.
There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.
What is constitutive is the action that divides madness, and not the science elaborated once this division is made.
No seventeenth-century pedagogue would have publicly advised his disciple, as did Erasmus in his Dialogues, on the choice of a good prostitute.
Islam, in the year 1978, was not the opium of the people precisely because it was the spirit of a world without spirit.
I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.
Truth is not by nature free-nor error servile-its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.
But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.
At every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, what one is.
The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.