Michel Foucault Quotes

Quotes about:

• Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.

  Michel Foucault

  School, People, Prison

  397 Copy quote

• 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

  Life, Philosophy, People

  368 Copy quote

• Where there is power, there is resistance.

  Michel Foucault

  Power, Resistance, Pizza

  Michael Kelly, Michel Foucault (1994). “Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate”, p.382, MIT Press

  332 Copy quote

• 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

  Interest In Life, Interest, Feels

  Michel Foucault (1988). “Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault”, Univ of Massachusetts Press

  374 Copy quote

• 'Truth' is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of truth.

  Michel Foucault

  Knowledge And Power, Regulation, Truth Is

  Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault (2006). “The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature”, The New Press

  360 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Thinking, Self

  272 Copy quote

• 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

  Mask, Ability, Tolerable

  Michel Foucault (2012). “The History of Sexuality: An Introduction”, p.86, Vintage

  217 Copy quote

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

  Michel Foucault

  Population, Prison

  254 Copy quote

• Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.

  Michel Foucault

  Surveillance, Our Society

  48 Copy quote

• 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

  Beautiful, Wisdom, Strong

  280 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Independent, Fighting

  Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault (2006). “The Chomsky - Foucault Debate: On Human Nature”, p.41, The New Press

  272 Copy quote

• Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.

  Michel Foucault

  Strength, Power, Names

  Michel Foucault (2012). “The History of Sexuality: An Introduction”, p.93, Vintage

  239 Copy quote

• 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

  Teaching, Class, Way

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

  188 Copy quote

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

  Michel Foucault

  Who I Am, Ask Me, Asks

  Michel Foucault, Jeremy Carrette (2013). “Religion and Culture”, p.13, Routledge

  96 Copy quote

• We are freer than we think.

  Michel Foucault

  Thinking

  34 Copy quote

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

  Michel Foucault

  Memories, Echoes, Hopelessly In Love

  235 Copy quote

• Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. 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

  Educational, Mean, Political

  Michel Foucault (2012). “The Archaeology of Knowledge”, p.373, Vintage

  257 Copy quote

• Power is everywhere...because it comes from everywhere.

  Michel Foucault

  Power

  "Who's Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History: From World War II to the Present Day". Book edited by Robert Aldrich and Gary Wotherspoon, 2001.

  67 Copy quote

• Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

  Michel Foucault

  Freedom, Tyrants, Authority

  Michel Foucault (1971). “Madness and Civilization”

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, House, Experts

  266 Copy quote

• ...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

  Sick, Different, Three

  222 Copy quote

• What I seek is a permanent opening of possibilities.

  Michel Foucault

  Possibility, Opening, Permanent

  80 Copy quote

• I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.

  Michel Foucault

  Jobs, Wall, Window

  34 Copy quote

• 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

  Doe, Fields, Constitution

  Michel Foucault (2012). “Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison”, p.24, Vintage

  280 Copy quote

• Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

  Michel Foucault

  School, Prison, Factories

  Michael Kelly, Michel Foucault (1994). “Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate”, p.176, MIT Press

  80 Copy quote

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