Michel Foucault Quotes

The practice of S/M is the creation of pleasure.... And that's why S/M is really a subculture. It's a process of invention. S/M isthe use of a strategic relationship as a source of pleasure.

In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of pirates.

The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.

To work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before

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

There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying things.

The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes.

Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse.

Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.

One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge.

What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.

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

There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.

We must escape and help others to escape the two readymade formulas of the pure sexual encounter and the lovers' fusion of identities.

You may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying, you will make a man that will live longer than he.

there is no glory in punishing

Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.

The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.

Political power goes much deeper than one suspects; there are centres and invisible, little-known points of support; its true resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn't expect it.

It is meaningless to speak in the name of - or against - Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.

Believe what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.

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.

Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.

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

The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.

Unreason is in the same relation to reason as dazzlement to the brightness of daylight itself.

But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.

it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime

Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine, help to support the political power. It's also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain cases related to psychiatry.

Little information is published on prisons, it is one of the hidden regions of our social system, one of the dark zones of our life.

I'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.

To punish is the most difficult thing there is. A society such as ours needs to question every aspect of punishment as it is practiced everywhere: in the army, the schools, the factories.

Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to something other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems.

What is constitutive is the action that divides madness, and not the science elaborated once this division is made.

Where can an interrogation lead us which does not follow reason in its horizontal course, but seeks to retrace in time that constant vertically which confronts European culture with what it is not?

Government is the right disposition of things.

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

With humanity, life has ended up with a living creature that never quite finds itself in the right place, a living creature destined to wander and endlessly make mistakes.

everything is dangerous, nothing is innocent

I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.

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

Among the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things ... only one, which began a century and a half ago ... has allowed the figure of man to appear.

The game is worthwhile in so far as we don't know what will be the end.

Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence....