Book Quotes by Michel Foucault

One should try to locate power at the extreme of its exercise, where it is always less legal in character.

— Michel Foucault

The book is not simply the object that one holds in one's hands, and it cannot remain within the little parallelpiped that contains it:…

— Michel Foucault

“But a punishment like forced labour or even imprisonment – mere loss of liberty – has never functioned without a certain additional element of…

— Michel Foucault

Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.

— Michel Foucault

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

— Michel Foucault

Let us ask... how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our…

— Michel Foucault

What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that…

— Michel Foucault

“It was a matter of showing by what conjunctions a whole set of practices-- from the moment they became coordinated with a regime of…

— Michel Foucault

“The preferred medications were those that forestalled corruption. We know 'as a result of more than three thousand years of experience that Myrrh and…

— Michel Foucault

“The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than…

— Michel Foucault

“Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with…

— Michel Foucault

Believe what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.

— Michel Foucault

Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ?

— Michel Foucault

An American professor complained that a crypto-Marxist like me was invited in the USA, and I was denounced by the press in Eastern European…

— Michel Foucault

Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which the Western thought has so long held sacred as…

— Michel Foucault