65 Best Michel Foucault Quotes From The French Philosopher

Michel Foucault is a 20th-century philosopher from France.

He was a renowned author, literary critic, and political activist working as a historian of ideas. He is best known as one of the most original and controversial thinkers.

Michel Foucault was a Marxist throughout his life. He believed that the French had oversimplified the transition of the monarchy to democracy by viewing it as the prevailing attainment of reason and freedom.

He is the author of the theory of 'power', namely the sovereign power and disciplinary power is the most famous and still is studied in many fields of communication studies, feminism, Marxism, and cultural studies.

Check the list below for Michel Foucault, 'Madness And Civilization' quotes, or Michel Foucault, 'Discipline And Punishment' quotes. You would feel inspired by the quotes from Michel Foucault from his life and work as well as his books expressing everything an author must think and know for true.

For more quotes like Philosopher Michel Foucault quotes check Kant quotes and 'Communist Manifesto' quotes.

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Author Michel Foucault Quotes About Power And Institutions

Knowledge is power quote is highly used by people across institutions in the world. This philosopher Foucault quote-list is necessary for the philosopher in you.

1. "All teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power."

- Michel Foucault.

2. "Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it."

- Michel Foucault.

3. "Truth is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it."

- Michel Foucault.

4. "The strategic adversary is fascism."

- Michel Foucault.

5. "Power is also exerted over the body, not so much as physical punishment, but as ideological orders."

- Michel Foucault.

6. "The fascism in us all that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us."

- Michel Foucault.

7. "Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions."

- Michel Foucault.

8. "Where there is power, there is resistance."

- Michel Foucault.

9. "Power is not an institution and not a structure... it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society."

- Michel Foucault.

10. "Visibility is a trap."

- Michel Foucault.

11. "The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces."

- Michel Foucault.

Knowledge By Michel Foucault Quotes From His Books

Book quotes are always appreciated in their true form. You will like and find the list below necessary as it talks about history, sexuality, work, the birth of ideas and more.  

12. "The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason... could only have come into existence in such a silence."

- 'Madness And Civilization', 1961.

13. "The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single haze to see everything constantly."

- 'Discipline and Punish', 1977.

14. "Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same."

- 'Religion And Culture', 1999.

15. "Power is tolerable only on the condition that it masks a substantial part of itself."

- 'History Of Sexuality', 1976.

16. "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"

- 'Discipline and Punish', 1977.

17. "Absurdity destroys the and of the enumeration by making impossible the in where the things enumerated would be divided up."

- 'The Order Of Things', 1970.

18. "Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning."

- 'Madness And Civilization', 1961.

19. "Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ?"

- 'Discipline And Punish', 1977.

20. "Truth is not by nature free - nor error servile - but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power."

- 'History Of Sexuality', 1978.

21. "We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge."

- 'Discipline And Punish', 1977.

22. "Unreason is to reason as dazzlement is to daylight."

- 'Madness And Civilization', 1961.

Political And Society Related Author Michel Foucault Quotes

You will like Michel Foucault's quotes if you are aware of the institutions that have been distinguished. This Foucault quote-list is inspirational for every man.

23. "Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance."

- Michel Foucault.

24. "Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are."

- Michel Foucault.

25. "Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting."

- Michel Foucault.

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

- Michel Foucault.

27. "The real political task in a society is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent."

- Michel Foucault.

28. "We are freer than we think."

- Michel Foucault.

29. "In our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life."

- Michel Foucault.

30. "The judges of normality are present everywhere."

- Michel Foucault.

31. "Knowledge is governed not by a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice."

- Michel Foucault.

32. "One must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, what one is."

- Michel Foucault.

33. "Search for what is good and strong and beautiful in your society and elaborate from there."

- Michel Foucault.

34. "What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?"

- Michel Foucault.

35. "Education may well be the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse."

- Michel Foucault.

Most Popular Philosopher Michel Foucault Quotes

Author and philosopher Michel Foucault, quotes are a gem for the philosopher kind. Here is a quote-list by the author Michel you'd like.

36. "From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art."

- Michel Foucault.

37. "Everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad."

- Michel Foucault.

38. "The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines."

- Michel Foucault.

39. "What I seek is a permanent opening of possibilities."

- Michel Foucault.

40. "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.

41. "More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face."

- Michel Foucault.

42. " That art is something which is specialized. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art?"

- Michel Foucault.

43. "Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?"

- Michel Foucault.

44. "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?"

- Michel Foucault.

45. "Fatal necessity that reduces man to dust we pass to a contemptuous contemplation of the nothingness that is life itself."

- Michel Foucault.

46. "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.

47. "You have to be a hero to face the morality of the times."

- Michel Foucault.

48. "The prison begins well before its doors. It begins as soon as you leave your house - and even before."

- Michel Foucault.

49. "A 'regime' of truth."

- Michel Foucault.

50. "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.

51. "To work is to undertake, to think something other than what one has thought before"

- Michel Foucault.

52. "People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do, but what they don't know is what they do does."

- Michel Foucault.

Influential Michel Foucault Quotes About Freedom, Subjectivity

Do you ever question the ideas in a book? This author and philosopher Foucault quote-list might help answer the necessary question of a man.

53. "I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am."

- Michel Foucault.

54. "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 domination."

- Michel Foucault.

55. "The fear before the absolute limit of death becomes interiorized in a continual process of ionization."

- Michel Foucault.

56. "The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning."

- Michel Foucault.

57. "Thought is no longer theoretical."

- Michel Foucault.

58. "Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism."

- Michel Foucault.

59. "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?"

- Michel Foucault.

60. "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.

61. "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."

- Michel Foucault.

62. "One cannot attend to oneself, take care of oneself, without a relationship to another person."

- Michel Foucault.

63. "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.

64. "The morality of an era can end an individual... In fact, many times throughout history, intolerance against what society considers 'immoral' has been taken to the extreme."

- Michel Foucault.

65. "The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body"

- Michel Foucault.

Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for Michel Foucault quotesthen you will surely like to read Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes or [Edward Burke quotes].

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