Michel Foucault Quotes

• For the nineteenth century, the initial model of madness would be to believe oneself to be God, while for the preceding centuries it had been to deny God.

  Michel Foucault

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Philosophy

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Happiness

• Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

  Michel Foucault

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Freedom

• 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

  Topics in Knowledge

• What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.

  Michel Foucault

  Topics in Life

• 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

  Topics in Love, Power

• 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

  Topics in Work

• 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

  Topics in Power, Society

• 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

  Topics in Art, Work

• 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

  Topics in Work

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

  Michel Foucault

  Topics in Power

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

  Michel Foucault

• 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

  Topics in Age, Funny

Michel Foucault (14)

Birth:	15th October, 1926
Death:	25th June, 1984
Nationality:	French
Profession:	Critic, Historian, Philosopher, Theorist

Related Authors

• Nils-Axel Morner
• Carl Clinton Van Doren
• Paul Engle
• Peter Warlock
• Les Murray
• Leslie Fiedler
• Jeremy Collier
• Richard Schickel
• Ted Solotaroff
• Ted Hughes

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 22nd December

Births

• 1957 - Susan Powter
• 1944 - Steve Carlton
• 1960 - Luther Campbell
• 1938 - Lucien Bouchard
• 1908 - Max Bill

Deaths

• 1987 - Sir Henry Thomas Cotton
• 1989 - Samuel Beckett
• 1906 - Robert Rainy
• 2001 - Lance Loud
• 1899 - Dwight L. Moody