Top 160 Michel Foucault Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Where there is power, there is resistance.”

— Michel Foucault

Featured in: Resistance Quotes

2. “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

3. “Visibility is a trap.”

— Michel Foucault

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

— Michel Foucault

Featured in: School Quotes

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

— Michel Foucault

Featured in: Quotes About Memories

6. “The soul is the prison of the body.”

— Michel Foucault

Featured in: Quotes About the Body

7. “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

8. “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

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

— Michel Foucault

10. “I’m no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.”

— Michel Foucault

11. “What I seek is a permanent opening of possibilities.”

— Michel Foucault

12. “Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.”

— Michel Foucault

13. “The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker -judge.”

— Michel Foucault

14. “Truth is not by nature free-nor error servile-its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.”

— Michel Foucault

15. “We are freer than we think.”

— Michel Foucault

16. “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

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

— Michel Foucault

18. “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”

— Michel Foucault

19. “It is meaningless to speak in the name of – or against – Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.”

— Michel Foucault

20. “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.”

— Michel Foucault

21. “The gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates.”

— Michel Foucault

22. “As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.”

— Michel Foucault

23. “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

24. “The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness.”

— Michel Foucault

25. “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

26. “There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying things.”

— Michel Foucault

27. “Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.”

— Michel Foucault

28. “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

29. “Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.”

— Michel Foucault

30. “Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.”

— Michel Foucault

31. “The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the outlaw, the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order.”

— Michel Foucault

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

— Michel Foucault

33. “The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.”

— Michel Foucault

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Michel Foucault

35. “In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of pirates.”

— Michel Foucault

36. “Politics and the economy are not things that exist, or illusions, or ideologies. They are things that do not exist and yet which are inscribed in reality and fall under a regime of truth dividing the true and the false.”

— Michel Foucault

37. “I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.”

— Michel Foucault

38. “In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.”

— Michel Foucault

39. “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.”

— Michel Foucault

40. “The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.”

— Michel Foucault

41. “Believe what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.”

— Michel Foucault

42. “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

43. “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

44. “It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.”

— Michel Foucault

45. “When man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world; the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of privation is his own nature, which will lay bare hell’s pitiless truth.”

— Michel Foucault

46. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

47. “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

48. “Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.”

— Michel Foucault

49. “What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?”

— Michel Foucault

50. “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.”

— Michel Foucault