64 Interesting Quotes By Michel Foucault
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.
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.
Where there is power, there is resistance.
Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.
I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.
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.
Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.
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.
Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.
The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.
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.
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.
Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.
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
I'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.
Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.
What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?
Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.
Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.
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.
Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.
You may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying, you will make a man that will live longer than he.
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.
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...
![We demand that sex speak the truth [...] and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves wich we think we possess in our immediate consciousness.](https://www.wisdomly.net/images/quotes/michel-foucault-37774.jpg)
We demand that sex speak the truth [...] and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves wich we think we possess in our immediate consciousness.
There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.
There is no glory in punishing
I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.
The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body
The individual is the product of power.
