Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Michel Foucault, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Michel Foucault quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 152 Michel Foucault quotes for you to read and share.

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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
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From the point of view of wealth, there is no difference between need, comfort and pleasure -- Michel Foucault
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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
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States are not populated in accordance with the natural progression of propagation, but by virtue of their industry, their products, and their different institutions. ... Men multiply like the yields from the ground and in proportion to the advantages and resources they find in their labors. -- Michel Foucault
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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? -- Michel Foucault
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When man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world; the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of privation is his own nature, which will lay bare hell's pitiless truth. -- Michel Foucault
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There is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present constituting that very thing which one attempts to counter it with. -- Michel Foucault
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It is meaningless to speak in the name of - or against - Reason, Truth, or Knowledge. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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The nineteenth century and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of "perversions." Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities. -- Michel Foucault
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The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi. -- Michel Foucault
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It is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime -- Michel Foucault
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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
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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. -- Michel Foucault
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One should try to locate power at the extreme of its exercise, where it is always less legal in character. -- Michel Foucault
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I am hopelessly in love with a memory.
An echo from another time, another place. -- Michel Foucault
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It may well be that we talk about sex more than anything else; we set our minds to the task; we convince ourselves that were have never said enough on the subject ... where sex is concerned the most long-winded, the most impatient of societies is our own. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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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
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After Sade, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of darkness, which we are now attempting to recover ... in our discourse, in our freedom, in our thought. -- Michel Foucault
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It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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[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
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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
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The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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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 -- Michel Foucault
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We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms, it 'excludes', it 'represses'... in fact power produces, it produces reality, it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. -- Michel Foucault
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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. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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It's amazing how people like judging. -- Michel Foucault
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There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze that each individual under its weight will end by [internalising] to the point that they are their own overseer, each individual thus exercising surveillance over, and against themself. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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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. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence. -- Michel Foucault
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Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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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
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everything is dangerous, nothing is innocent -- Michel Foucault
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Storytellers continue their narratives late into the night to forestall death and to delay the inevitable moment when everyone must fall silent. Scheherazade's story is a desperate inversion of murder; it is the effort, throughout all those nights, to exclude death from the circle of existence. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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The great hospitals, houses of confinement, establishments of religion and public order, of assistance and punishment, of governmental charity and welfare measures, are a phenomenon of the classical period: -- Michel Foucault
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Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ? -- Michel Foucault
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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
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Surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action. -- Michel Foucault
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In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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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
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Visibility is a trap. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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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
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We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library. -- Michel Foucault
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Among the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things ... only one, which began a century and a half ago ... has allowed the figure of man to appear. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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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
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Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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Religion for them [Iranians] was like a promise and guarantee of finding something that would radically change their subjectivity -- Michel Foucault
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The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal. -- Michel Foucault
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There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying things. -- Michel Foucault
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The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness -- Michel Foucault
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there is no glory in punishing -- Michel Foucault
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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. -- Michel Foucault
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Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning; in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth. -- Michel Foucault
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I'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem. -- Michel Foucault
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Where there is power, there is resistance. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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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
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Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting. -- Michel Foucault
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What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself? -- Michel Foucault
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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
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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
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Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know. -- Michel Foucault
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For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question -- Michel Foucault
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There are times in
life when the question of knowing if one can think differently
than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is
absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting
at all. -- Michel Foucault
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There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses. -- Michel Foucault
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One cannot attend to oneself, take care of oneself, without a relationship to another person. -- Michel Foucault
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The manifest discourse, therefore, is really no more than the repressive presence of what it does not say; and this 'not-said' is a hollow that undermines from within all that is said. -- Michel Foucault
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This knowledge, so inaccessible, so formidable, the Fool, in his innocent idiocy, already possesses. -- Michel Foucault
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Power is tolerable only on condition that it masks a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to an ability to hide its own mechanisms. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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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
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We are freer than we think. -- Michel Foucault
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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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What is constitutive is the action that divides madness, and not the science elaborated once this division is made. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty. -- Michel Foucault
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I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls. -- Michel Foucault
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To work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before -- Michel Foucault
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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
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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
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Government is the right disposition of things. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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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
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In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise. -- Michel Foucault
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Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments. -- Michel Foucault
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Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence ... -- Michel Foucault
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Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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It [Iranian Islamic Revolution] is perhaps the first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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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
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Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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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
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Truth is not by nature free-nor error servile-its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power. -- Michel Foucault
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Power is everywhere ... because it comes from everywhere. -- Michel Foucault
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Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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The soul is the prison of the body. -- Michel Foucault
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Discipline 'makes' individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise. It is not a triumphant power...it is a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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We are entering the age of the infinite examination and of compulsory objectification. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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The individual is the product of power. -- Michel Foucault
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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. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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What I seek is a permanent opening of possibilities. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest. -- Michel Foucault
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[Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice. -- Michel Foucault
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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. -- Michel Foucault
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One makes war to win, not because it's just. -- Michel Foucault
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My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous. -- Michel Foucault
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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. -- Michel Foucault
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The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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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
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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
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Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Unreason is in the same relation to reason as dazzlement to the brightness of daylight itself. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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At every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, what one is. -- Michel Foucault
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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
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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