Michel Foucault Quotes - Page 2

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

The gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates.

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

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.

There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

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

Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning; in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth.

The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.

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.

Total surveillance is increasingly the general condition of society as a whole.

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

Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.

...it's my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.

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

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? 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.

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

Why shouldn't I be interested in politics? That is to say, what blindness, what deafness, what density of ideology would have to weigh me down to prevent me from being interested in what is probably the most crucial subject to our existence, that is to say the society in which we live, the economic relations within which it functions, and the system of power which defines the regular forms and the regular permissions and prohibitions of our conduct. The essence of our life consists, after all, of the political functioning of the society in which we find ourselves.

Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life?

[Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice.

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

Domination is not that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over others, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society.

there is no glory in punishing

Visibility is a trap.

The soul is the prison of the body.

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