Michel Foucault Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• 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

  Thinking, Practice, Criticism

  34 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Writing, Finals

  22 Copy quote

• 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

  War, Struggle, Men

  Michel Foucault (1975). “The birth of the clinic: an archaeology of medical perception”, Vintage

  45 Copy quote

• My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad.

  Michel Foucault

  Dangerous

  Michael Kelly, Michel Foucault (1994). “Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate”, p.226, MIT Press

  58 Copy quote

• ... we are obliged to produce the truth by the power that demands truth and needs it in order to function: we are constrained, we are condemned to admit the truth or to discover it. Power constantly asks questions and questions us; it constantly investigates and records; it institutionalizes the search for the truth, professionalizes it, and rewards it. ... In a different sense, we are also subject to the truth in the sense that truth lays down the law: it is the discourse of truth that decides, at least in part; it conveys and propels effects of power.

  Michel Foucault

  Knowledge And Power, Order, Law

  58 Copy quote

• there is no glory in punishing

  Michel Foucault

  Glory

  Michel Foucault (2012). “Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison”, p.10, Vintage

  10 Copy quote

• Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history

  Michel Foucault

  Errors, Long, Baking

  Michel Foucault (1980). “Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews”, p.144, Cornell University Press

  33 Copy quote

• At every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, what one is.

  Michel Foucault

  Thinking, Steps, Moments

  34 Copy quote

• What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression

  Michel Foucault

  Running, Negative, Needs

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

  8 Copy quote

• Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital.

  Michel Foucault

  War, Names, Population

  Michel Foucault (1978). “The History of Sexuality: An Introduction”, New York : Pantheon Books

  15 Copy quote

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

  Michel Foucault

  Doors, House, Prison

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  30 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Intelligent, Political Will

  13 Copy quote

• It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time

  Michel Foucault

  Would Be, Hegemony, Matter

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

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Punishment, Target, Guilty Person

  Michel Foucault (2012). “Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison”, p.108, Vintage

  5 Copy quote

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

  Michel Foucault

  Madness, Language, Reason

  "History of Madness".

  31 Copy quote

• 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

  Clothes, Intellectual, Facts

  Michel Foucault (1980). “Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews”, p.207, Cornell University Press

  14 Copy quote

• There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. 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. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.

  Michel Foucault

  Struggle, Book, Thinking

  "Michel Foucault". Book by Didier Eribon translated by Betsy Wind, 1989.

  66 Copy quote

• To work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before

  Michel Foucault

  Thinking

  14 Copy quote

• Relations of power "are indissociable from a discourse of truth, and they can neither be established nor function unless a true discourse is produced, accumulated, put into circulation, and set to work. Power cannot be exercised unless a certain economy of discourses of truth functions in, on the basis of, and thanks to, that power."

  Michel Foucault

  Knowledge And Power, Thanks, Economy

  10 Copy quote

• You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from a lazar house, he becomes infuriated.

  Michel Foucault

  Real, Differences, House

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

  54 Copy quote

• Because they claim to be concerned with the welfare of whole societies, governments arrogate to themselves the right to pass off as mere abstract profit or loss the human unhappiness that their decisions provoke or their negligence permits. It is a duty of an international citizenship to always bring the testimony of people's suffering to the eyes and ears of governments, sufferings for which it's untrue that they are not responsible. The suffering of men must never be a mere silent residue of policy. It grounds an absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power.

  Michel Foucault

  Eye, Loss, Men

  13 Copy quote

• If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.

  Michel Foucault

  Birthday, Power, Age

  Michel Foucault (2012). “The History of Sexuality: An Introduction”, p.5, Vintage

  58 Copy quote

• Since the Fall, man had accepted labor as a penance and for its power to work redemption. It was not a law of nature which forced man to work, but the effect of a curse.

  Michel Foucault

  Work, Fall, Men

  Michel Foucault (2013). “Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason”, p.55, Vintage

  31 Copy quote

• The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body

  Michel Foucault

  Political, Soul, Body

  Michel Foucault (2012). “Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison”, p.27, Vintage

  24 Copy quote

• My role - and that is too emphatic a word - is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed.

  Michel Foucault

  People, Roles, Moments

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

  45 Copy quote

Page 3 of 8

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin