Quotes from 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.

What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?

I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.

if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing

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.

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. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know where it will end.

The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.

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

The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play).

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.

A critique does not consist in saying that things aren't good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based... To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy.

The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.

What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?

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.

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

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.

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

Visibility is a trap.

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.

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.

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