Top 160 Michel Foucault Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.”

— Michel Foucault

52. “The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.”

— Michel Foucault

53. “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.”

— Michel Foucault

54. “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

55. “Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.”

— Michel Foucault

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

— Michel Foucault

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

— Michel Foucault

58. “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

59. “To punish is the most difficult thing there is. A society such as ours needs to question every aspect of punishment as it is practiced everywhere: in the army, the schools, the factories.”

— Michel Foucault

60. “Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.”

— Michel Foucault

61. “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms, it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’... in fact power produces, it produces reality, it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.”

— Michel Foucault

62. “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

63. “If I won a few billion in the lottery, I would create an institute where people who would like to die would come spend a weekend, a week, or a month in pleasure, under drugs perhaps, in order to disappear afterward, as if erased.”

— Michel Foucault

64. “Penal law was not created by the common people, nor by the peasantry, nor by the proletariat, but entirely by the bourgeoisie as an important tactical weapon in this system of divisions which they wished to introduce.”

— Michel Foucault

65. “Chance does not speak essentially through words nor can it be seen in their convolution. It is the eruption of language, its sudden appearance. It’s not a night twinkle with stars, an illuminated sleep, nor a drowsy vigil. It is the very edge of consciousness.”

— Michel Foucault

66. “Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.”

— Michel Foucault

67. “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.”

— Michel Foucault

68. “The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is – to live it dangerously.”

— Michel Foucault

69. “The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.”

— Michel Foucault

70. “Unreason is in the same relation to reason as dazzlement to the brightness of daylight itself.”

— Michel Foucault

71. “I’m not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.”

— Michel Foucault

72. “To work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before.”

— Michel Foucault

73. “It is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its dominion; death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most private.”

— Michel Foucault

74. “Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse.”

— Michel Foucault

75. “We are entering the age of the infinite examination and of compulsory objectification.”

— Michel Foucault

76. “Surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action.”

— Michel Foucault

77. “Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise.”

— Michel Foucault

78. “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

79. “There is object proof that homosexuality is more interesting than heterosexuality. It’s that one knows a considerable number of heterosexuals who would wish to become homosexuals, whereas one knows very few homosexuals who would really like to become heterosexuals.”

— Michel Foucault

80. “Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night’s hallucinations and the non-being of light’s judgments.”

— Michel Foucault

81. “For millenia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his exitence as a living being in question.”

— Michel Foucault

82. “Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life?”

— Michel Foucault

83. “The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”

— Michel Foucault

84. “In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.”

— Michel Foucault

85. “I’m very proud that some people think that I’m a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist.”

— Michel Foucault

86. “In short, the history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the interruption of events in favour of stable structures.”

— Michel Foucault

87. “What is constitutive is the action that divides madness, and not the science elaborated once this division is made.”

— Michel Foucault

88. “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

89. “One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge.”

— Michel Foucault

90. “Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.”

— Michel Foucault

91. “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.”

— Michel Foucault

92. “One should try to locate power at the extreme of its exercise, where it is always less legal in character.”

— Michel Foucault

93. “Resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous principles; but neither are they a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite.”

— Michel Foucault

94. “Politics is not what it pretends to be, the expression of a collective will. Politics breathes well only where this will is multiple, hesitant, confused, and obscure even to itself.”

— Michel Foucault

95. “Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.”

— Michel Foucault

96. “Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy into a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”

— Michel Foucault

97. “Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.”

— Michel Foucault

98. “Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.”

— Michel Foucault

99. “One makes war to win, not because it’s just.”

— Michel Foucault

100. “I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.”

— Michel Foucault