FOUCAULT QUOTES

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

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

“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.”

“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 strategic situation in a particular society.”

“There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine.”

“The soul is the prison of the body.”

“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.”

“The birth of the clinic is not simply a demonstration of medical power; it is also the inscription and reinforcement of economic and political control.”

“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.”

“My job is to make windows where there were once walls.”

“Where there is power, there is resistance.”

“We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’.”

“The most familiar definition of man is that he is a being who goes on two legs and is unfeathered.”

“In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.” OLD LIKE WINE QUOTE

“Discipline is a political anatomy of detail.”

“One of the major techniques of the nineteenth century, which was repeated in the 20th century, was to use people’s own bodies as tools for training them to fit into the social machine.”

“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.”

“A work of art must carry within itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he recognizes the subject matter.”

“Criticism is not an end in itself or a weapon in polemics; it is an element in a complex strategic situation.”

“The end of the institution is not the education and instruction of the pupil; it is his deportation from the world of childhood and from all human constraint.”

“Knowledge is not simply an instrument of power; it inhibits power, undermines power, transgresses power.”

“Sexuality is not primarily a drive or instinct; it is a social construction and a political tool used to control bodies and regulate behavior.”

“Man is only a recent invention; in fact, he is still being invented.”

“We need to create an alternative economy based on the equal distribution of knowledge and creativity.”

“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.”

“Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free.”