Top Michel Foucault Quotes

Michel Foucault Biography

Paul-Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984), generally known as Michel Foucault (French: [miʃɛl fuko]), was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic.

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Michel Foucault Quotes

We should not be content to say that power has a need for such-and-such a discovery, such-and-such a form of knowledge, but we should add that the exercise of power itself creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information. . . . The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power. . . . It is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power.

Discovery, Exercise, Knowledge, Knowledge And Power, Perpetually

The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.

Discipline, Disciplines, Enlightenment, Invented, Liberty

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.

Belong, Eye, Generations, Limited, Students, Waiting

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

Character, Exercise, Locate, Power

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.

Breathe, Confused, Expression, Hesitant, Multiple

The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and "psychic hermaphroditism" made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of "perversity"; but it also made possible the formation of a "reverse" discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or "naturality" be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.

Discourses, Medically, Psychics, Speak, Strong, Vocabulary

It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.

Essential, Essentials, Forms, Knowledge, Linked, Science

Penal law was not created by the common people, nor by the peasantry, nor by the proletariat, but entirely by the bourgeoisie as an important tactical weapon in this system of divisions which they wished to introduce.

Created, Important, Law, People, Proletariat, Weapon

If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.

Age, Birthday, Considerable, Except, Power, Sexuality

The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.

Fight, Fighting, Independent, Institutions, Real, Society

To work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before

Think, Thinking, Thought, Undertake, Work

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.

Frequently, Know, Life, People, Philosophy

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

Begins, Doors, House, Leave, Prison

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.

Man, Men, People, Think, Thinking, Wrong

The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.

Leaves, Love Is, Lovers, Moment, Moments, Taxi

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

Cutting, Knowledge, Made, Understanding

Let us ask. . . how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors, etc. . . . we should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc. We should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects.

Ask, Constitution, Desire, Dictate, Power, Trying

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

Echoes, Hopelessly, Hopelessly In Love, Memories, Place, Time

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

Ask, Ask Me, Asks, Remain, Same, Who I Am

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.

Bad, Begin, Liberated, Men, Struggle, War

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Michel Foucault Biography

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