Michel Foucault Quotes
Collection of top 76 famous quotes about Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Michel 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
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
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
Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.
— 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
Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.
— Michel Foucault
It's amazing how people like judging.
— 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
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
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
Visibility is a trap.
— 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
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
The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.
— 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
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
Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.
— Michel Foucault
The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.
— Michel Foucault
We are freer than we think.
— Michel Foucault
Religion for them [Iranians] was like a promise and guarantee of finding something that would radically change their subjectivity
— Michel Foucault
Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.
— 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
There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.
— Michel Foucault
What is constitutive is the action that divides madness, and not the science elaborated once this division is made.
— Michel Foucault
One makes war to win, not because it's just.
— 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
Surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action.
— 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
Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.
— Michel Foucault
Truth is not by nature free-nor error servile-its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.
— 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
We are entering the age of the infinite examination and of compulsory objectification.
— Michel Foucault
The individual is the product of power.
— 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
[Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice.
— Michel Foucault
I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.
— 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
One should try to locate power at the extreme of its exercise, where it is always less legal in character.
— Michel Foucault
everything is dangerous, nothing is innocent
— Michel Foucault
What I seek is a permanent opening of possibilities.
— Michel Foucault