Michel Foucault quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Michel Foucault on Wise Famous Quotes.

Unreason is in the same relation to reason as dazzlement to the brightness of daylight itself.

Government is the right disposition of things.

Power is everywhere ... because it comes from everywhere.

One cannot attend to oneself, take care of oneself, without a relationship to another person.

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

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.

Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ?

This knowledge, so inaccessible, so formidable, the Fool, in his innocent idiocy, already possesses.

Where there is power, there is resistance.

Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.

It is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime

The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness

As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

From the point of view of wealth, there is no difference between need, comfort and pleasure

Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.

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.

Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.

It's amazing how people like judging.

Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.

I am hopelessly in love with a memory.
An echo from another time, another place.

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.

In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.

there is no glory in punishing

Visibility is a trap.

My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.

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.

The soul is the prison of the body.

Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.

I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.

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.

We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power.

What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?

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.

Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.

The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.

We are freer than we think.

Religion for them [Iranians] was like a promise and guarantee of finding something that would radically change their subjectivity

Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.

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.

One makes war to win, not because it's just.

No seventeenth-century pedagogue would have publicly advised his disciple, as did Erasmus in his Dialogues, on the choice of a good prostitute.

Surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action.

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.

To work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before

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.

We are entering the age of the infinite examination and of compulsory objectification.

The individual is the product of power.

At every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, what one is.

[Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice.

I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.

The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.

One should try to locate power at the extreme of its exercise, where it is always less legal in character.

It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.

The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.

everything is dangerous, nothing is innocent

What I seek is a permanent opening of possibilities.

It is meaningless to speak in the name of - or against - Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.

Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence ...