Top 100 Michel Foucault Quotes
#1. The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the outlaw, the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order.
Michel Foucault
#2. 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
#3. One cannot attend to oneself, take care of oneself, without a relationship to another person.
Michel Foucault
#4. People can tolerate two homosexuals they see leaving together, but the next day they're smiling, holding hands, tenderly embracing one another, then they cannot be forgiven. It is not the departure for pleasure that is unacceptable, it is waking up happy.
Michel Foucault
#5. Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.
Michel Foucault
#6. 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
#7. The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness
Michel Foucault
#8. I belong to that generation who, as students, had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism. For me the break was first Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance.
Michel Foucault
#10. [Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice.
Michel Foucault
#11. In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.
Michel Foucault
#12. All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of meaning
not one drop of rain falling after another, much less a feather or a torn-of leaf.
Michel Foucault
#13. Domination is not that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over others, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society.
Michel Foucault
#14. 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
#15. Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.
Michel Foucault
#16. I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.
Michel Foucault
#17. Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.
Michel Foucault
#18. Politics is not what it pretends to be, the expression of a collective will. Politics breathes well only where this will is multiple, hesitant, confused, and obscure even to itself.
Michel Foucault
#19. 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
#20. And now, if we try to assign a value, in and of itself, outside its relations to the dream and with error, to classical unreason, we must understand it not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled.
Michel Foucault
#21. Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ?
Michel Foucault
#22. To punish is the most difficult thing there is. A society such as ours needs to question every aspect of punishment as it is practiced everywhere: in the army, the schools, the factories.
Michel Foucault
#23. 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
#24. Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.
Michel Foucault
#25. Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments.
Michel Foucault
#26. The strategic adversary is fascism ... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.
Michel Foucault
#27. We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power.
Michel Foucault
#28. What is peculiar to modern societies is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.
Michel Foucault
#29. Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.
Michel Foucault
#30. Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse.
Michel Foucault
#31. I am hopelessly in love with a memory.
An echo from another time, another place.
Michel Foucault
#32. My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.
Michel Foucault
#33. Since the Fall, man had accepted labor as a penance and for its power to work redemption. It was not a law of nature which forced man to work, but the effect of a curse.
Michel Foucault
#34. Death as the destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty words, the hollow jingle of a jester's cap and bells.
Michel Foucault
#35. There is object proof that homosexuality is more interesting than heterosexuality. It's that one knows a considerable number of heterosexuals who would wish to become homosexuals, whereas one knows very few homosexuals who would really like to become heterosexuals.
Michel Foucault
#36. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.
Michel Foucault
#37. Politics and the economy are not things that exist, or illusions, or ideologies. They are things that do not exist and yet which are inscribed in reality and fall under a regime of truth dividing the true and the false.
Michel Foucault
#38. Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.
Michel Foucault
#39. Resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous principles; but neither are they a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite.
Michel Foucault
#40. If you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing
Michel Foucault
#41. Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.
Michel Foucault
#42. Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.
Michel Foucault
#43. Power is everywhere ... because it comes from everywhere.
Michel Foucault
#44. I'm very proud that some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist.
Michel Foucault
#45. In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.
Michel Foucault
#46. Chance does not speak essentially through words nor can it be seen in their convolution. It is the eruption of language, its sudden appearance. It's not a night twinkle with stars, an illuminated sleep, nor a drowsy vigil. It is the very edge of consciousness.
Michel Foucault
#47. Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
Michel Foucault
#48. 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
#49. Nietzsche was a revelation to me. I felt that there was someone quite different from what I had been taught. I read him with a great passion and broke with my life, left my job in the asylum, left France: I had the feeling I had been trapped. Through Nietzsche, I had become a stranger to all that.
Michel Foucault
#50. Religion for them [Iranians] was like a promise and guarantee of finding something that would radically change their subjectivity
Michel Foucault
#51. This knowledge, so inaccessible, so formidable, the Fool, in his innocent idiocy, already possesses.
Michel Foucault
#52. Self-attachment is the first sign of madness, but it is because man is attached to himself that he accepts error as truth, lies as reality, violence and ugliness as beauty and justice.
Michel Foucault
#53. It's my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.
Michel Foucault
#54. The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.
Michel Foucault
#55. If those arrangements [the fundamental arrangements of knowledge] were to disappear as they appeared ... then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
Michel Foucault
#56. If I won a few billion in the lottery, I would create an institute where people who would like to die would come spend a weekend, a week, or a month in pleasure, under drugs perhaps, in order to disappear afterward, as if erased.
Michel Foucault
#57. Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.
Michel Foucault
#58. The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.
Michel Foucault
#60. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species
Michel Foucault
#62. The first task of the doctor is ... political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government. Man will be totally and definitively cured only if he is first liberated ...
Michel Foucault
#64. Do not acid vapors have the very properties of melancholia, whereas alcoholic vapors, always ready to burst into flame, suggest frenzy; and sulfurous vapors, agitated by a violent and continuous movement, indicate mania?
Michel Foucault
#65. From the point of view of wealth, there is no difference between need, comfort and pleasure
Michel Foucault
#66. The practice of S/M is the creation of pleasure ... And that's why S/M is really a subculture. It's a process of invention. S/M isthe use of a strategic relationship as a source of pleasure.
Michel Foucault
#67. 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
#68. We demand that sex speak the truth [ ... ] and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves wich we think we possess in our immediate consciousness.
Michel Foucault
#69. It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time
Michel Foucault
#70. This is the historical reality of the soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision, and constraint.
Michel Foucault
#71. Surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action.
Michel Foucault
#72. It is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies.
Michel Foucault
#73. All life was finally judged by this degree of irritation: abuse of things that were not natural, the sedentary life of cities, novel reading, theatergoing, immoderate thirst for knowledge,
Michel Foucault
#74. You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from a lazar house, he becomes infuriated.
Michel Foucault
#75. Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.
Michel Foucault
#76. Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence ...
Michel Foucault
#77. It is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its dominion; death is power's limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most private.
Michel Foucault
#78. Under the authority of a language that had been carefully expurgated so that it was no longer directly named, sex was taken charge of, tracked down as it were, by a discourse that aimed to allow it no obscurity, no respite.
Michel Foucault
#79. I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.
Michel Foucault
#80. It is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that transverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge.
Michel Foucault
#81. 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
#82. The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes.
Michel Foucault
#83. Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning; in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth.
Michel Foucault
#84. The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.
Michel Foucault
#86. As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
Michel Foucault
#87. What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?
Michel Foucault
#88. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital.
Michel Foucault
#89. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
Michel Foucault
#90. Thus historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by the present state of knowledge, they increase with every transformation and never cease, in turn, to break with themselves
Michel Foucault
#91. [L]et us say that we are obliged to produce the truth by the power that demands truth and needs it in order to function: we are forced to tell the truth, we are constrained, we are condemned to admit the truth or to discover it.
Michel Foucault
#92. Unreason is in the same relation to reason as dazzlement to the brightness of daylight itself.
Michel Foucault
#93. Where can an interrogation lead us which does not follow reason in its horizontal course, but seeks to retrace in time that constant vertically which confronts European culture with what it is not?
Michel Foucault
#95. Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.
Michel Foucault
#97. 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
#98. Discourse is not life; its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying you will make a man that will live longer than he.
Michel Foucault
#99. Sadism ... is a massive cultural fact that appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century and that constitutes one of the greatest conversions of the occidental imagination ... madness of desire, the insane delight of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite.
Michel Foucault
#100. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of pirates
Michel Foucault
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