Michel Foucault Quotes

In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted ...

All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carry...

If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the...

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to o...

Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in ord...

The problem of Islam as a political force is an essential one for our time and for the years to come...

In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject wit...

Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authori...

Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed wi...

Discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of powe...

With humanity, life has ended up with a living creature that never quite finds itself in the right p...

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

The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavi...

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

everything is dangerous, nothing is innocent

We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois wa...

There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze,...

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

In a sense, I am a moralist, insofar as I believe that one of the tasks, one of the meanings of huma...

The institution of monarchy developed during the Middle Ages against the backdrop of the previously ...

The history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discover...

There has been so much action in the past,” said D.H. Lawrence, “especially sexual action, a wearyin...

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

We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms, it ‘excludes’, it...

Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our o...

It may well be that we talk about sex more than anything else; we set our minds to the task; we conv...

The child is more individualised than the adult, the patient more than the healthy man, the madman a...

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

The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among s...

Knowledge doesn't really form part of human nature. Conflict, combat, the outcome of the combat, and...

Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, w...

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger,...

The work of an intellectual is not to form the political will of others; it is, through the analyses...

Curiosity evokes ‘concern’; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readines...

But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all...

The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power. In the seventeenth century,...

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

We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the 'social-worker...

And if it is true that the image still has the function of speaking, of transmitting something consu...

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

The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his lif...

There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any kno...

The fact that the crime and the punishment were related and bound up in the form of atrocity was not...

Visibility is a trap.

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

The marvellous logic of the mad which seems to mock that of the logicians because it resembles it so...

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

Sadism ... is a massive cultural fact that appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century a...

I'm struck by the difficulty I had in formulating it. When I think back now, I ask myself what else ...

Discourse is not life; its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you ma...

The necessity of reform mustn’t be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, o...

Government is the right disposition of things.

Where there is power, there is resistance.

In actual fact. The manifold sexualities - those which appear with the different ages (sexualities o...

For was this transformation of sex into discourse not governed by the endeavor to expel from reality...

The nineteenth century and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexua...

[T]hus one should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the law is what con...

Through the various discourses, legal sanctions against minor perversions were multiplied; sexual ir...

People will be surprised at the eagerness with which we went aboutpretending to rouse from its slumb...

Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the thing...

After Sade, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of represen...

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

In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one 'episteme' that defines the c...

It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invent...

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the ...

To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who s...

Among the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things ... only one, which began a century a...

It would seem that the author’s name, unlike other proper names, does not pass from the interior of ...

As a result, we must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author. We are accustomed, as we h...

Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, “sacralized” and “sa...

The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill...