Quotes from Michel Foucault

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

My hypothesis is not so much that the court is the natural expression of popular justice, but rather that its historical function is to ensnare it, to control it and strangle it, by re-inscribing it within institutions which are typical of a state apparatus.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

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.

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

Discipline "makes" individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise.

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.

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.

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.

We need to cut off the King´s Head: in political theory that has still to be done.