A collection of quotes and sayings by Michel Foucault on punishment, discipline, education, thought, books, knowledge, madness, power, panopticism and resistance
Michel Foucault was an eminent French philosopher, historian, literary critic, and social theorist. His writings, thoughts and theories primarily highlight the relationship between knowledge and power. They also throw light on how societal institutions use power and knowledge as a form of social control. He was often labelled as postmodernist and post-structuralist, but he condemned these labels. His works, writings, and thoughts have strongly influenced academics, including those working in literary theory, sociology, critical theory and cultural studies. His theories have also been termed as compelling by activist groups. We have created a corpus of thought-provoking, motivating and inspiring quotes by Michel Foucault. Let us browse through the quotes and thoughts by Michel Foucault on trap, oppression, nature, chance, life, power, technology, love, society, freedom, justice, expression and more.
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
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.
Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.
Michel Foucault
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.
The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.
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
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
Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.
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
We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them.
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
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.
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...
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.
Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.
Michel Foucault
People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.
Michel Foucault
The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness
Michel Foucault
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.
It is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime
Michel Foucault
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.
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
Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with it's thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything.
Michel Foucault
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
It is meaningless to speak in the name of - or against - Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.
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.
In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one 'episteme' that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in theory or silently invested in a practice.
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
Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to something other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems.
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
How could the disciplines and the power that functions in them appear arbitrary, when they merely operate the mechanisms of justice itself, even with a view to mitigating their intensity?
