Paul-Michel Doria Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault’s theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory. May these Michel Foucault Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.
1. “We are freer than we think.” Michel Foucault
2. “Knowledge is not made for understanding, it is made for cutting.” Michel Foucault
3. “I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.” Michel Foucault
4. “There is no glory in punishing.” Michel Foucault
5. “The gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates.” Michel Foucault
6. “If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end.” Michel Foucault
7. “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. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?” Michel Foucault
8. “The first task of the doctor is, political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government.” Man will be totally and definitively cured only if he is first liberated.” Michel Foucault
9. “Power is everywhere, because it comes from everywhere.” Michel Foucault
10. “What I seek is a permanent opening of possibilities.” Michel Foucault
11. “Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.” Michel Foucault
12. “The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge.” Michel Foucault
13. “Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.” Michel Foucault
14. “Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.” Michel Foucault Michel Foucault
15. “One cannot attend to oneself, take care of oneself, without a relationship to another person.” Michel Foucault
16. “Search for what is good and strong and beautiful in your society and elaborate from there. Push outward. Always create from what you already have. Then you will know what to do.” Michel Foucault
18. “Where there is power, there is resistance.” Michel Foucault
19. “Truth is not by nature free – nor error servile – but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.” Michel Foucault
20. “Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.” Michel Foucault
21. “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.” Michel Foucault
22. “The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.” Michel Foucault
23. “Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning, in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth.” Michel Foucault
24. “If you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing.” Michel Foucault
25. “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.” Michel Foucault
26. “To change something in the minds of people – that’s the role of an intellectual.” Michel Foucault
27. “Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.” Michel Foucault
28. “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 strategical situation in a particular society.” Michel Foucault
29. “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.” Michel Foucault
30. “A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.” Michel Foucault
31. “From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.” Michel Foucault
32. “Total surveillance is increasingly the general condition of society as a whole.” Michel Foucault
33. “My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad.” Michel Foucault
34. “‘Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. ‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A ‘regime’ of truth.” Michel Foucault
35. “Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.” Michel Foucault
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