Philosophy Quotes by Michel Foucault

12 Philosophy quotes by Michel Foucault

All Philosophy quotes Michel Foucault’s page

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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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People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what…

Michel Foucault

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“Death as the destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty…

Michel Foucault

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“Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is…

Michel Foucault

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Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence; truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an origincal affinity…

Michel Foucault

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There are moments in life where the question of knowing whether one might think otherwise than one thinks and perceive otherwise than…

Michel Foucault

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But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention,…

Michel Foucault

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“It is pointless to ask: Why then is sex so secret? What is this force that so long reduced it to silence…

Michel Foucault

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There is a sort of myth of History that philosophers have… History for philosophers is some sort of great, vast continuity in…

Michel Foucault

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“The necessity of reform mustn’t be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, or halt the exercise of…

Michel Foucault

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“This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the…

Michel Foucault

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“The history of ideas, then, is the discipline of beginnings and ends, the description of obscure continuities and returns, the reconstitution of…

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 punishment that certainly concerns the body itself: rationing of food, sexual deprivation, corporal punishment, solitary confinement … There remains, therefore, a trace of ‘torture’ in the modern mechanisms of criminal justice – a trace that has…

Michel Foucault

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 bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors, etc... we should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc.…

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 says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as…

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 truth––was able to make what does not exist (madness, disease, delinquency, sexuality), nonetheless become something, something however that continues not to exist. That is to say, what I would like to show is not how an…

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