Foucault Quotes: top 83 famous quotes about Foucault

Foucault Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Foucault quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

Government is the right disposition of things. — Michel Foucault

Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too. — Walter Kirn

Power is everywhere ... because it comes from everywhere. — Michel Foucault

It [Foucault's Pendulum] can be very comforting for people of my generation, who ate disappointment for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. — Umberto Eco

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

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism. — Michel Foucault

In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of pirates — Michel Foucault

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 — Michel Foucault

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. — Michel Foucault

Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning; in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth. — Michel Foucault

Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. — Michel Foucault

The game is worthwhile in so far as we don't know what will be the end. — FOUCAULT MICHEL

Foucault is the Cagliostro of our time. — Camille Paglia

I'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem. — Michel Foucault

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

Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else. — FOUCAULT MICHEL

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

Where there is power, there is resistance. — Michel Foucault

Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance. — Michel Foucault

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

The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness — Michel Foucault

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

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

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

There is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present constituting that very thing which one attempts to counter it with. — Michel Foucault

Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments. — Michel Foucault

Visibility is a trap. — Michel Foucault

To contribute usefully to the advance of science, one must sometimes not disdain from undertaking simple verifications. — Leon Foucault

I'm interested in philosophical psychology, people like Nietzsche, Freud, Alcan, Foucault, Derrida. — Hanif Kureishi

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

Foucault's pendulum would — Anthony Doerr

Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting. — Michel Foucault

The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court. — Michel Foucault

It's amazing how people like judging. — Michel Foucault

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

there is no glory in punishing — Michel Foucault

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

My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous. — Michel Foucault

Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know. — Michel Foucault

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. — Michel Foucault

The soul is the prison of the body. — Michel Foucault

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

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

One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. — Michel Foucault

In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king. — Michel Foucault

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

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

We must escape and help others to escape the two readymade formulas of the pure sexual encounter and the lovers' fusion of identities. — Michel Foucault

Foucault (1984) suggests that those who produce knowledge and truths gain power by controlling others' access to knowledge. — S. Ashley Kistler

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. — Michel Foucault

Islam, in the year 1978, was not the opium of the people precisely because it was the spirit of a world without spirit. — Michel Foucault

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

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

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

What is constitutive is the action that divides madness, and not the science elaborated once this division is made. — Michel Foucault

There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses. — Michel Foucault

Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people. — Michel Foucault

Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. — Michel Foucault

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

We are freer than we think. — Michel Foucault

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

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

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. — Michel Foucault

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. — Michel Foucault

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

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

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

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

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

What I seek is a permanent opening of possibilities. — Michel Foucault

everything is dangerous, nothing is innocent — Michel Foucault

On other spaces' (Foucault 1993). — Gordana Fontana-Giusti

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

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

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. — Michel Foucault

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

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

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

The individual is the product of power. — Michel Foucault

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

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. — Michel Foucault

Truth is not by nature free-nor error servile-its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power. — Michel Foucault