Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

Michel Foucault

142 quotes

“We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Michel Foucault, quoted in Subrata Chattopadhyay Banerjee - The Development of Aryan Invasion Theory in India, A Critique of Nineteenth-Century Social Constructionism-Springer (2020)
“[T]ruly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Discourse on Language, Inaugural Lecture at the Collège de France, 1970-1971. tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith
“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon)
“Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought as a fish exists in water; that is, it ceases to breathe anywhere else.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted by , The lives of Michel Foucault (1993) p. 177. Citing 'Les Intellectuels et le Pouvoir', Le'Arc 49, 1972, pp. 3-10. Discussion with Gilles Deleuze, (4 March 1972). Reprinted, Le Nouvel Observateur, (8 May 19…
“The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one's sex, but, rather, to use one's sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships. And, no doubt, homosexuality is not a form of desire but something desirable. Therefore, we have to work at becoming homosexuals.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Friendship as a Way of Life," interview in Gai pied, April 1981, as translated in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (1994), pp. 135-136
“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. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault (25 October 1982)
“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 (1926–1984) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault (25 October 1982)
“Qui définit le moment où j'écris?”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Un cours inedit" in Magazine littéraire (May 1984), page 34.
“One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. (When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverts it, one has an ideological production.) The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: What is an author?" (1984)
“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 (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Who's Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History: From World War II to the Present Day (2001) by Robert Aldrich and Gary Wotherspoon
“What all these people are doing is not aggressive; they are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body — through the eroticization of the body. I think it's ... a creative enterprise, which has as one of its main features what I call the desexualization of pleasure.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In reference to Sadism and Masochism, as quoted in Who's Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History: From World War II to the Present Day (2001) by Robert Aldrich and Gary Wotherspoon
“There has been an inversion in the hierarchy of the two principles of antiquity, “Take care of yourself” and “Know yourself.” In Greco-Roman culture, knowledge of oneself appeared as the consequence of the care of the self. In the modern world, knowledge of oneself constitutes the fundamental principle.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Technologies of the Self,” Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (1994), p. 228
“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 (1926–1984) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Practicing criticism, or, is it really important to think?”, interview by Didier Eribon, May 30-31, 1981, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. L. Kriztman (1988), p. 155
“My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress.” Afterword, in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (1983)
“Je crois que le pouvoir politique s’exerce encore, s’exerce en outre, de plus, par l’intermédiaire d’un certain nombre d’institutions qui ont l’air comme ça de n’avoir rien de commun avec le pouvoir politique, qui ont l’air d’en être indépendantes et qui ne le sont pas.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Debate with Noam Chomsky, École Supérieure de Technologie à Eindhoven, November 1971
“Il me semble que la tache politique actuelle dans une société comme la notre c’est de critiquer le jeu des institutions apparemment les plus neutres et les plus indépendantes, de les critiquer et les attaquer de telle manière que la violence politique qui s’exerçait obscurément en elles (les institutions) surgissent et qu’on puisse lutter contre elles.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Debate with Noam Chomsky, École Supérieure de Technologie à Eindhoven, November 1971
“The gesture that divides madness is the constitutive one, not the science that grows up in the calm that returns after the division has been made.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Preface to 1961 edition
“The constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Preface to 1961 edition
“But what then is this confrontation below the language of reason? Where might this interrogation lead, following not reason in its horizontal becoming, but seeking to retrace in time this constant verticality, which, the length of Western culture, confronts it with what it is not, measuring it with its own extravagance?”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Preface to 1961 edition
“At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world. In the margins of the community, at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable. For centuries, these reaches would belong to the non-human. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, they would wait, soliciting with strange incantations a new incarnation of disease, another grimace of terror, renewed rites of purification and exclusion.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Meaning created links so numerous, so rich and involved that only esoteric knowledge could possibly have the necessary key. Objects became so weighed down with attributes, connections and associations that they lost their own original face. Meaning was no longer read in an immediate perception, and accordingly objects ceased to speak directly: between the knowledge that animated the figures of objects and the forms they were transformed into, a divide began to appear, opening the way for a symbolism more often associated with the world of dreams.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In its most general form, confinement was explained, or at least justified, by a will to avoid scandal. It thereby signalled an important change in the consciousness of evil. The Renaissance had let unreason in all its forms come out into the light of day, as public exposure gave evil the chance to redeem itself and to serve as an exemplum.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If our intention now is to reveal classical unreason on its own terms, outside of its ties with dreams and error, it must be understood not as a form of reason that is somehow diseased, lost or mad, but quite simply as reason dazzled.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The circle of day and night is the law of the classical world: the most restricted but most demanding of the necessities of the world, the most inevitable but the simplest of the legislations of nature. This was a law that excluded all dialectics and all reconciliation, consequently laying the foundations for the smooth unity of knowledge as well as the uncompromising division of tragic existence. It reigns on a world without darkness, which knows neither effusiveness nor the gentle charms of lyricism. All is waking or dreams, truth or error, the light of being or the nothingness of shadow.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is the moment when it becomes clear that the images of madness are nothing but dream and error, and that if the unfortunate sufferer who is blinded by them invokes them, it is the better to disappear with them into the annihilation for which they are destined.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the tragedies of the early seventeenth century, madness too provided the dénouement, but it did so in liberating the truth. It still opened onto language, to a renewed form of speech, that of explanation and of the real regained. The most it could ever be was the penultimate moment of tragedy. Not the closing moment, as in Andromaque, where no truth appears, other than, in Delirium, the truth of a passion that finds its fullest, most perfect expression in madness.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To sum up all these steps, each of which is very lengthy and complex, we will have put the game of truth back in the network of constraints and dominations. Truth, I should say rather, the system of truth and falsity, will have revealed the face it turned away from us for so long and which is that of its violence.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nietzsche was the first to release the desire to know from the sovereignty of knowledge itself: to re-establish the distance and exteriority that Aristotle cancelled.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Absurdity destroys the and of the enumeration by making impossible the in where the things enumerated would be divided up.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Between the fine point of the brush and the steely gaze, the scene is about to yield up its volume.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The painter is turning his eyes towards us only in so far as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject. We, the spectators, are an additional factor. Though greeted by that gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself. But, inversely, the painter's gaze, addressed to the void confronting him outside the picture, accepts as many models as there are spectators; in this precise but neutral place, the observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are observing ourselves being observed by the painter, and made visible to his eyes by the same light that enables us to see him. And just as we are about to apprehend ourselves, transcribed by his hand as though in a mirror, we find that we can in fact apprehend nothing of that mirror but its lusterless back. The other side of a psyche.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[L]'âme, prison du corps.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Discipline and Punish (1977) as translated by Alan Sheridan, p. 30
“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Discipline and Punish (1977) as translated by Alan Sheridan, p. 228
“It is ugly to be punishable, but there is no glory in punishing. Hence the double system of protection that justice has set up between itself and the punishment it imposes.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The guillotine takes life almost without touching the body, just as prison deprives of liberty or a fine reduces wealth. It is intended to apply the law not so to a real body capable of feeling pain as to a juridical subject, the possessor, among other rights, of the right to exist it had to have the abstraction of the law itself.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was an important moment. The old partners of the spectacle of punishment, the body and the blood, gave way. A new character came of the scene, masked. It was the end of a certain kind of tragedy; comedy began, with shadow play, faceless voices, impalpable entities. The apparatus of punitive justice must now bite into this bodiless reality.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Instead of insanity eliminating the crime according to the original meaning of article 64,every crime and even every offense now carries within it, as a legitimate suspicion, but also as a right that may be claimed, the hypothesis of insanity, in any case of anomaly. And the sentence that condemns or acquits is not simply a judgement of guily, a legal decision that lays down punishment; it bears within it an assessment of normality and a technical prescription for a possible normalization Today the judge- magistrate or juror0 certainly does more than 'judge'”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The disappearance of public executions marks therefore the decline of the spectacle; but it also marks a slackening of the hold on the body.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A utopia of judicial reticence: take away life, but prevent the patient from feeling it; deprive the prisoner of all rights, but do not inflict pain; impose penalties free of all pain. Recourse to psycho-pharmacology and to various physiological ‘disconnectors’, even if it is temporary, is a logical consequence of this ‘non-corporal’ penalty.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge; a genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases, justifications and rules, from which it extends its effects and by which it extends its effects and by which it masks its exorbitant singularity.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The public execution is to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If torture was so strongly embedded in legal practice, it was because it revealed truth and showed the operation of power. It assured the articulation of the written on the oral, the secret on the public, the procedure of investigation on the operation of the confession; it made it possible to reproduce the crime on the visible body of the criminal.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the ceremonies of the public execution, the main character was the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not only must people know, they must see with their own eyes. Because they must be made to be afraid; but also because they must be the witnesses, the guarantors, of the punishment, and because they must to a certain extent take part in it.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The criticism of the reformers was directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This dysfunction of power was related to a central excess: what might be called the monarchical 'super-power', which identified the right to punish with the personal power of the sovereign.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the old system, the body of the condemned man became the king's property, on which the sovereign left his mark and brought down the effects of his power. Now he will be rather the property of society, the object of a collective and useful appropriation.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Above the punitive city hangs this iron spider; and the criminal who is to be thus crucified by the new law is parricide.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A great prison structure was planned, whose different levels would correspond exactly to the levels of the centralized administration. The scaffold, where the body of the tortured criminal had been exposed to the ritually manifested force of the sovereign, the punitive theatre in which the representation of punishment was permanently available to the social body, was replaced by a great enclosed, complex and hierarchized structure that was integrated into the very body of the state apparatus.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source