"Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting."
— Michel Foucault (The Foucault Reader)

"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 (Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason)

"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

"The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play)."
— Michel Foucault

"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

"...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

""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

"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

"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

"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 (The History of Sexuality: An Introduction)

"...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

"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 (The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception)

"A way of life can be shared among individuals of different ages, status, and social activity. It can yield intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized. It seems to me that a way of life can yield a culture and an ethics. To be "gay," I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual but to try and define and develop a way of life."
— Michel Foucault (Ethics)

"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

"[Raymond Roussel] said that after his first book he expected that the next morning there would be a kind of aura around his person and that everyone in the street would be able to see that he had written a book. This is the obscure desire harboured by everyone who writes. It is true that the first text one writes is neither written for others, nor because one is what one is: one writes to become other than what one is. One tries to modify one's way of being through the act of writing."
— Michel Foucault

"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

"A critique does not consist in saying that things aren't good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based... To do critcism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy. "
— Michel Foucault

"Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret."
— Michel Foucault (The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception)

"I would like to distinguish between the "history of ideas" and the "history of thought". The history of ideas involves the analysis of a notion from its birth, through its development, and in the setting the other ideas which constitute its context. The history of thought is the analysis of the way an unproblematic field of experience becomes a problem, raises discussions and debate, incites new reactions, and induces crisis in the previously silent behavior, habits, practices and institutions.
It is the history of the people become anxious,for example about madness,about crime,about themselves, or about truth."
— Michel Foucault (Fearless Speech)

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

"Perhaps [transgression] is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity."
— Michel Foucault (Language, Counter Memory, Practice)

"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

""The preferred medications were those that forestalled corruption. We know 'as a result of more than three thousand years of experience that Myrrh and Aloes preserve corpses.' (Lange, 1689) Are not these deteriorations of the bodies of the same nature as those that accompany the diseases of the humors?""
— Michel Foucault

"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 (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison)

"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 (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison)

"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 (The History of Sexuality: An Introduction)

"The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines."
— Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison)

"Because they claim to be concerned with the welfare of whole societies, governments arrogate to themselves the right to pass off as mere abstract profit or loss the human unhappiness that their decisions provoke or their negligence permits. It is a duty of an international citizenship to always bring the testimony of people's suffering to the eyes and ears of governments, sufferings for which it's untrue that they are not responsible. The suffering of men must never be a mere silent residue of policy. It grounds an absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power."
— Michel Foucault (Power: Essential Works 3 1954-84)

"The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court."
— Michel Foucault

"[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 (Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976)

"Are you going to change yet again, shift your position according to the questions that are put to you, and say that the objections are not really directed at the place from which you are speaking? Are you going to declare yet again that you have never been what you have been reproached with being? Are you already preparing the way out that will enable you in your next book to spring up somewhere else and declare as you're now doing: no, no, I'm not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you?'
'What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing – with a rather shaky hand – a labyrinth into which I can venture, into which I can move my discourse... in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. 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 (The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language)

"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

"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 History of Sexuality: The Care of the Self)

"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 (The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language)

"I would like to distinguis between the "history of ideas" and the "history of thought". The history of ideas involves the analysis of a notion from its birth, through its development, and in the setting the other ideas which constitute its context. The history of thought is the analysis of the way an unproblematic field of experience becomes a problem, raises discussions and debate, incites new reactions, and induces crisis in the previously silent behavior, habits, practices and institutions.
It is the history of the people become anxious,for example about madness,about crime,about themselves, or about truth."
— Michel Foucault

"Because they claim to be concerned with the welfare of whole societies, governments arrogate to themselves the right to pass off as mere abstract profit or loss the human unhappiness that their decisions provoke or their negligence permits. It is a duty of an international citizenship to always bring the testimony of people's suffering to the eyes and ears of governments, sufferings for which it's untrue that they are not responsible. The suffering of men must never be a mere silent residue of policy. It grounds an absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power."
— Michel Foucault (Power: Essential Works 3 1954-84)