Quotes from Michel Foucault

States are not populated in accordance with the natural progression of propagation, but by virtue of their industry, their products, and their different institutions.… Men multiply like the yields from the ground and in proportion to the advantages and resources they find in their labors.

All life was finally judged by this degree of irritation: abuse of things that were not natural, the sedentary life of cities, novel reading, theatergoing, immoderate thirst for knowledge

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

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

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.

thus historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by the present state of knowledge, they increase with every transformation and never cease, in turn, to break with themselves

la conveniencia de las actitudes esquiva los cuerpos, la decencia de las palabras blanquea los discursos

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.

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.

Menuret repeats an observation of Forestier's that clearly shows how an excessive loss of a humor, by drying out the vessels and fibers, may provoke a state of mania; this was the case of a young man who 'having married his wife in the summertime, became maniacal as a result of the excessive intercourse he had with her.

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.

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:

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.

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 a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end.

The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of his power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination.

The necessity of reform mustn't be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstance should one pay attention to those who tell one Don't criticize, since you are not capable of carrying out a reform. that's ministerial cabinet talk. Critique doesn't have to be the premise of a deduction that concludes, this then is what needs to be done. It should be an instrument of those who fight, who resist and refuse what is...

For millennia, 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 existence as a living being in question

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.

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.

Government is the right disposition of things.

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

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

everything is dangerous, nothing is innocent

For was this transformation of sex into discourse not governed by the endeavor to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction: to say no to unproductive activities, to banish casual pleasures, to reduce or exclude practices whose object was not procreation?