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Knowledge Quotes by Michel Foucault

12 Knowledge quotes by Michel Foucault

All Knowledge quotes Michel Foucault’s page

If you’re curious about how power shapes what we call truth, this modest set of Foucault’s reflections offers a clear entry point. Each line peels back layers of institutional authority, inviting you to question the foundations of what we accept as knowledge.

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Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.

Michel Foucault

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Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.

Michel Foucault

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It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.

Michel Foucault

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[Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice.

Michel Foucault

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There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and…

Michel Foucault

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“In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one 'episteme' that defines the conditions of possibility of…

Michel Foucault

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“It is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but…

Michel Foucault

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The history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history…

Michel Foucault

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Knowledge doesn't really form part of human nature. Conflict, combat, the outcome of the combat, and, consequently, risk and chance are what…

Michel Foucault

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Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to…

Michel Foucault

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We should not be content to say that power has a need for such-and-such a discovery, such-and-such a form of knowledge, but…

Michel Foucault

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To seek in the great accumulation of the already-said the text that resembles "in advance" a later text, to ransack history in…

Michel Foucault

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More 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

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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

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

Michel Foucault

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

Michel Foucault

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

Michel Foucault

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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

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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

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“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

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“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

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“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

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“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

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Believe what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.

Michel Foucault

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