Top 160 Michel Foucault Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “From a Christian point of view, human reason is madness compared to the reason of God, but divine reason appears as madness to human reason.”

— Michel Foucault

102. “Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to something other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems.”

— Michel Foucault

103. “Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.”

— Michel Foucault

104. “The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full-stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.”

— Michel Foucault

105. “And now, if we try to assign a value, in and of itself, outside its relations to the dream and with error, to classical unreason, we must understand it not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled.”

— Michel Foucault

106. “The institution of monarchy developed during the Middle Ages against the backdrop of the previously endemic struggles between feudal power agencies. The monarchy presented itself as a referee, aa power capable of putting an end to war, violence, and pillage and saying no to these struggles and private feuds. It made itself acceptable by allocating itself a juridical and negative function, albeit one whose limits it naturally began at once to overstep.”

— Michel Foucault

107. “When I write, I do it above all to change myself and not to think the same thing as before.”

— Michel Foucault

108. “It’s amazing how people like judging.”

— Michel Foucault

109. “Islam, in the year 1978, was not the opium of the people precisely because it was the spirit of a world without spirit.”

— Michel Foucault

110. “The body is given meaning and wholly constituted by discourse. The body vanishes as a biological entity and becomes instead a socially constituted product which is infinitely malleable and highly unstable.”

— Michel Foucault

111. “In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on on hand, the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby authorizing a relation only through the abstract universality of disease; on the other, the man of madness communicates with society only by the intermediary of an equally abstract reason which is order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the requirements of conformity.”

— Michel Foucault

112. “I belong to that generation who, as students, had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism. For me the break was first Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance.”

— Michel Foucault

113. “People can tolerate two homosexuals they see leaving together, but the next day they’re smiling, holding hands, tenderly embracing one another, then they cannot be forgiven. It is not the departure for pleasure that is unacceptable, it is waking up happy.”

— Michel Foucault

114. “My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.”

— Michel Foucault

115. “Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with it’s thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything.”

— Michel Foucault

116. “This knowledge, so inaccessible, so formidable, the Fool, in his innocent idiocy, already possesses.”

— Michel Foucault

117. “The great hospitals, houses of confinement, establishments of religion and public order, of assistance and punishment, of governmental charity and welfare measures, are a phenomenon of the classical period:.”

— Michel Foucault

118. “Poder y placer no se anulan; no se vuelven el uno contra el otro; se persiguen, se encabalgan y reactivan. Se.”

— Michel Foucault

119. “Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.”

— Michel Foucault

120. “From being the object of a religious experience and sanctified, poverty became the object of a moral conception that condemned.”

— Michel Foucault

121. “Modern man is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets, and his hidden truth; he is a man who tries to invest himself.”

— Michel Foucault

122. “The corollary of the possibility of conceiving other worlds – this one being, de facto, only a domain – is the impossibility of moving beyond the world we inhabit and the imperious necessity of accepting its frontiers as limits.”

— Michel Foucault

123. “The punishment must proceed from the crime; the law must appear to be a necessity of things, and power must act while concealing itself beneath the gentle force of nature.”

— Michel Foucault

124. “Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.”

— Michel Foucault

125. “For the madness of men is a divine spectacle: “In fact, could one make observations from the Moon, as did Menippus, considering the numberless agitations of the Earth, one would think one saw a swarm of flies or gnats fighting among themselves, struggling and laying traps, stealing from one another, playing, gamboling, falling, and dying, and one would not believe the troubles, the tragedies that were produced by such a minute animalcule destined to perish so shortly.”

— Michel Foucault

126. “I am not a professional historian: nobody is perfect.”

— Michel Foucault

127. “From the point of view of wealth, there is no difference between need, comfort and pleasure.”

— Michel Foucault

128. “Exercise is the technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are both repetitive and different, but always graduated. By bending behavior towards a terminal state, exercise makes possible a perpetual characterization of the individual... It thus assures, in the form of continuity and constraint, a growth, an observation, a qualification.”

— Michel Foucault

129. “How could the disciplines and the power that functions in them appear arbitrary, when they merely operate the mechanisms of justice itself, even with a view to mitigating their intensity?”

— Michel Foucault

130. “With humanity, life has ended up with a living creature that never quite finds itself in the right place, a living creature destined to wander and endlessly make mistakes.”

— Michel Foucault

131. “It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance.”

— Michel Foucault

132. “It is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies.”

— Michel Foucault

133. “Where can an interrogation lead us which does not follow reason in its horizontal course, but seeks to retrace in time that constant vertically which confronts European culture with what it is not?”

— Michel Foucault

134. “Hermann Boerhaave still defined melancholia as merely “a long persistent delirium without fever, during which the sufferer is obsessed by only one thought.”

— Michel Foucault

135. “The manifest discourse, therefore, is really no more than the repressive presence of what it does not say; and this ‘not-said’ is a hollow that undermines from within all that is said.”

— Michel Foucault

136. “Hence, too, my main concern will be to locate the forms of power, the channels it takes, and the discourses it permeates in order to reach the most tenuous and individual modes of behavior, the paths that give it access to the rare or scarcely perceivable forms of desire, how it penetrates and controls everyday pleasure – all this entailing effects that may be those of refusal, blockage, and invalidation, but also incitement and intensification: in short, the “polymorphous techniques of power.”

— Michel Foucault

137. “Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence...”

— Michel Foucault

138. “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 such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.”

— Michel Foucault

139. “A utopia of judicial reticence: take away life, but prevent the patient from feeling it; deprive the prisoner of all rights, but do not inflict pain; impose penalties free of all pain. Recourse to psycho-pharmacology and to various physiological ‘disconnectors’, even if it is temporary, is a logical consequence of this ‘non-corporal’ penality. The.”

— Michel Foucault

140. “Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”

— Michel Foucault

141. “It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by a functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished – and in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized, over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives.”

— Michel Foucault

142. “That is not all, however: this relationship between writing and death is also manifested in the effacement of the writing subject’s individual characteristics. Using all the contrivances that he steps up between himself and what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality. As a result, the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more that the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing.”

— Michel Foucault

143. “The nineteenth century and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of “perversions.” Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities.”

— Michel Foucault

144. “There can only be a true life as an other life, and it’s from the point of view of this other life that the ordinary life of ordinary people will be made to appear as precisely other than the true. I live in an other way, and through the very alterity of my life, I show you that what you are looking for is elsewhere than where you are looking, that the road you are taking is an other road than the one you should be taking.”

— Michel Foucault

145. “And if it is true that the image still has the function of speaking, of transmitting something consubstantial with language, we must recognize that it already no longer says the same thing; and that by its own plastic values painting engages in an experiment that will take it farther and farther from language, whatever the superficial identity of the theme.”

— Michel Foucault

146. “After Sade, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of darkness, which we are now attempting to recover... in our discourse, in our freedom, in our thought.”

— Michel Foucault

147. “Sadism... is a massive cultural fact that appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century and that constitutes one of the greatest conversions of the occidental imagination... madness of desire, the insane delight of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite.”

— Michel Foucault

148. “Moreover, it is not entirely without significance that true love was, in Platonic philosophy – but also, as you know, in a whole sector, a whole domain of Christian spirituality and mysticism – the form par excellence of the true life. Since Platonism, true love and the true life have traditionally belonged together, and to a large extend Christian Platonism will take up this theme.”

— Michel Foucault

149. “This last point is a request to the English-speaking reader. In France, certain half-witted ‘commentators’ persist in labelling me a ‘structuralist’. I have been unable to get it into their tiny minds that I have used none of the methods, concepts, or key terms that characterize structural analysis. I should be grateful if a more serious public would free me from a connection that certainly does me honour, but that I have not deserved.”

— Michel Foucault

150. “Writing unfolds like a game that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. 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