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Michel Foucault Quotes

Michel Foucault Quotes.

The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.
Michel Foucault
Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.
Michel Foucault
In political and social analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king.
Michel Foucault
I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.
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
For the bourgeoisie, the main danger against which it had to be protected, that which had to be avoided at all costs, was armed uprising, was the armed people, was the workers taking to the streets in an assault against the government.
Michel Foucault
The problem of Islam as a political force is an essential one for our time and for the years to come, and we cannot approach it with a modicum of intelligence if we start out from a position of hatred.
Michel Foucault
The university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class.
Michel Foucault
Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ?
Michel Foucault
The gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates.
Michel Foucault
Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.
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
Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.
Michel Foucault
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
Penal law was not created by the common people, nor by the peasantry, nor by the proletariat, but entirely by the bourgeoisie as an important tactical weapon in this system of divisions which they wished to introduce.
Michel Foucault
One cannot attend to oneself, take care of oneself, without a relationship to another person.
Michel Foucault
Search for what is good and strong and beautiful in your society and elaborate from there. Push outward. Always create from what you already have. Then you will know what to do.
Michel Foucault
It is often said that definitions of Islamic government are imprecise. To me, however, they seemed to have a clarity that was completely familiar and also, it must be said, far from reassuring.
Michel Foucault
Where there is power, there is resistance.
Michel Foucault
Prison is a recruitment center for the army of crime. That is what it achieves.
Michel Foucault
There are forms of oppression and domination which become invisible – the new normal.
Michel Foucault
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
This non-proletarianised plebs has been racialist when it has been colonialist; it has been nationalist – chauvinist – when it has been armed; and it has been fascist when it has become the police force.These ideological effects on the plebs have been uncontestable and profound.
Michel Foucault
Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.
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