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

“The chief function of the disciplinary power is to 'train', rather than to select and to levy; or, no doubt, to train in order to levy and select all the more. It does not link forces together in order to reduce them; it seeks to bind them together in such a way as to multiply and use them”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single haze to see everything constantly. A central point would be both the source of light illuminating everything, and a locus of convergence for everything that must be known: a perfect eye that nothing would escape and a centre towards which all gazes would be turned.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are aware of all the inconveniences of prison, and that it is dangerous when it is not useless. And yet one cannot 'see' how to replace it. It is the detestable solution, which one seems unable to do without.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behavior, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Generally speaking, all the authorities exercising individual control function according to a double mode; that of binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive assignment, of differential distribution (who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized' how he is to be recognized' how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in a individual way, etc.).”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But a punishment like forced labour or even imprisonment – mere loss of liberty – has never functioned without a certain additional element of punishment that certainly concerns the body itself: rationing of food, sexual deprivation, corporal punishment, solitary confinement ... There remains, therefore, a trace of ‘torture’ in the modern mechanisms of criminal justice – a trace that has not been entirely overcome, but which is enveloped, increasingly, by the non-corporal nature of the penal system”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence...the soul is the effect and instrument of political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Exercise is the technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are both repetitive and different, but always graduated. By bending behavior towards a terminal state, exercise makes possible a perpetual characterization of the individual...It thus assures, in the form of continuity and constraint, a growth, an observation, a qualification.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Homosexuality appears as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence; truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an original affinity with freedom: traditional themes in philosophy, which a political history of truth would have to overturn by showing that truth is not by nature free--nor error servile--but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power. The confession is an example of this.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“L’important, c’est que le sexe n’ait pas été seulement affaire de sensation et de plaisir, de loi ou d’interdiction, mais aussi de vrai et de faux.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Les discours sont des éléments ou des blocs tactiques dans le champ des rapports de force; il peut y en avoir de différents et même de contradictoires à l'intérieur d'une même stratégie; ils peuvent au contraire circuler sans changer de forme entre des stratégies opposées.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Recalling all the erroneous things that doctors have been able to say about sex or madness does us a fat lot of good. I think that what is currently politically important is to determine the regime of verediction established at a given moment ... on the basis of which you can now recognize, for example, that doctors in the nineteenth century said so many stupid things about sex. ... It is not so much the history of the true or the history of the false as the history of verediction which has a political significance.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Lecture 2, January 17, 1979, p. 36
“All these present struggles revolve around the question: Who are we? They are a refusal of these abstractions, of economic and ideological state violence, which ignore who we are individually, and also a refusal of a scientific or administrative inquisition which determines who one is.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All those movements which took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and which had the Reformation as their main expression and result should be analyzed as a great crisis of the Western experience of subjectivity and a revolt against the kind of religious and moral power which gave form, during the Middle Ages, to this subjectivity. The need to take a direct part in spiritual life, in the work of salvation, in the truth which lies in the Book—all that was a struggle for a new subjectivity.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our day is not to try to liberate the individual from the state and from the state's institutions but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't really know what they mean by "intellectuals," all the people who describe, denounce, or scold them. I do know, on the other hand, what I have committed myself to, as an intellectual, which is to say, after all, a cerebro-spinal individual: to having a brain as supple as possible and a spinal column that's as straight as necessary.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of the truth-teller, or of truth telling... [W]ho is able to tell the truth, about what, with what consequences, and with what relations to power. ...[W]ith the question of the importance of telling the truth, knowing who is able to tell the truth, and knowing why we should tell the truth, we have the roots of what we could call the 'critical' tradition in the West.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Parrhesia is ordinarily translated into English by "free speech"... the parrhesiastes is the one who uses parrhesia, i.e., the one who speaks the truth.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]n parrhesia, the speaker makes it... clear and obvious that what he says is his own opinion... by avoiding... rhetorical form which would veil what he thinks. ...[T]he parrhesiastes uses the most direct words and... expression. Whereas rhetoric provides ...technical devices to help ...prevail upon ...minds ...(regardless of the rhetorician's... opinion...)”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he commitment... in parrhesia is linked to... a difference of status between the speaker and his audience... the parrhesiastes says something which is dangerous to himself and thus involves a risk...”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The second characteristic of parrhesia... there is always an exact coincidence between belief and truth.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the Greek conception of parrhesia... truth-having is guaranteed by the possession of... moral qualities... required... to know... and... convey such truth...”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there is a kind of "proof" of the sincerity of the parrhesiastes, it is his courage... [Saying] something dangerous—different from what the majority believes—is a strong indication that he is a parrhesiastes.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[R]ecognizing someone as a parrhesiastes... was... important... in Greco-Roman society, and... was explicitly raised and discussed by Plutarch, Galen, and others.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]hen a philosopher addresses himself to... a , and tells him... tyranny is incompatible with justice, then the philosopher speaks... [and] believes he is speaking the truth, and... takes a risk... [T]hat was Plato's situation with Dionysius in Syracuse... reference... Plato's Seventh Letter, and... The Life of Dion by Plutarch.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ref: 1) , Plato's seventh letter (1966) 2) Plutarch, Life of Dion
“Parrhesia... in its extreme form... takes place in the "game" of life or death. ...[Y]ou risk death to tell the truth instead of reposing in the security of a life where... truth goes unspoken. ...[H]e prefers himself as... truth-teller rather than... living... false to himself”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Parrhesia is... always a "game" between the one who speaks the truth and the interlocutor.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he function of parrhesia... has the function of criticism: criticism of the interlocutor or of the speaker...”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The parrhesia comes from "below,"... and is directed... "above." ...[A]n ancient Greek would not say ...a teacher or father who criticizes a child uses parrhesia.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]hen a philosopher criticizes a ... a citizen criticizes the majority... a pupil criticizes his teacher... such speakers may be using parrhesia.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The last characteristic of parrhesia... telling the truth is regarded as a duty.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In parrhesia the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of and moral apathy... in most of the Greek texts... from the Fifth Century B.C. to the Fifth Century A.D.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]n Euripides' plays and... in the texts of the Fourth Century B.C., parrhesia is an essential characteristic of .”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A sovereign shows himself to be a if he disregards his honest advisors, or punishes them for what they have said.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In... Plato, Socrates appears in the role of the perrhesiastes.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[The play] Ion is... devoted to the problem of parrhesia... [I]t pursues the question; who has the right, the duty, and the courage to speak the truth?”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[[Power|[P]ower]] without limitation is directly related to madness. The man who exercises power is wise only insofar as there exists someone who can use parrhesia to criticize him, thereby putting some limit to his power, to his command.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source