Michel Foucault > Quotes

“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

“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

“Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.”
― Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader

“Where there is power, there is resistance.”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: An Introduction

“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

“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 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 love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know where it will end.”
― Michel Foucault

“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?”
― Michel Foucault

“The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.”
― Michel Foucault, The Chomsky - Foucault Debate: On Human Nature

“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

“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

“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 criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy.”
― Michel Foucault

“Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.”
― 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

“I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.”
― Michel Foucault

“The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes. ”
― 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

“...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 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.”
― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

“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

“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, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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

“Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present. ”
― Michel Foucault

“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

“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

“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

“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, Essential Works of Foucault (1954-1984), Volume 1: Ethics

“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

“Thought is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate or enslave. Even before prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm, thought, at the level of its existence, in its very dawning, is in itself an action-a perilous act.”
― Michel Foucault