Michel Foucault Short Quotes

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

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

Michel Foucault
Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

Michel Foucault
… a passion which has found with madness the perfection of its fulfillment.

Michel Foucault
To change something in the minds of people - that's the role of an intellectual.

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

Michel Foucault
What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?

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

Michel Foucault
Unreason is in the same relation to reason as dazzlement to the brightness of daylight itself.

Michel Foucault
The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body

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

Michel Foucault
Modernity is the attitude that makes it possible to grasp the 'heroic' aspect of the present moment.

Michel Foucault
I'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.

Michel Foucault
Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

Michel Foucault
Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.

Michel Foucault
Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning; in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth.

Michel Foucault
What is constitutive is the action that divides madness, and not the science elaborated once this division is made.

Michel Foucault
Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments.

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

Michel Foucault
Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought as a fish exists in water; that is, it ceases to breathe anywhere else.

Michel Foucault
It is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime

Michel Foucault
There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

Michel Foucault
We must not understand it [madness] as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled.

Michel Foucault
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
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
The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.

Michel Foucault
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
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
Discipline "makes" individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise.

Michel Foucault
Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.

Michel Foucault