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.

Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.

In political and social analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king.

I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates.

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

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.

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.

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.

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

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.

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.

Where there is power, there is resistance.

Prison is a recruitment center for the army of crime. That is what it achieves.

There are forms of oppression and domination which become invisible – the new normal.

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.

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.

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.

…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