Michel Foucault Quotes

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

I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.

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.

Where there is power, there is resistance.

There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations

Search for what is good and strong and beautiful in your society and elaborate from there. Push outward. Always create from what you already have. Then you will know what to do.

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.

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

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

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.

Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.

The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge.

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

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.

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

The gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates.

Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.

What I seek is a permanent opening of possibilities.

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.

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

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.

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

My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad.

Total surveillance is increasingly the general condition of society as a whole.

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

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

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.

Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.

Truth is not by nature free - nor error servile - but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.

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

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

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

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

The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.

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.

'The prison' begins well before its doors. It begins as soon as you leave your house - and even before.

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.

We are freer than we think.

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

The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body

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

To change something in the minds of people - that's the role of an intellectual.

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.

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

Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life?

Visibility is a trap.

The soul is the prison of the body.

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.

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