110+ Michel Foucault Quotes On Power, Knowledge And Education

Michel Foucault was a French historian and philosopher who is best known for his critical studies of social institutions. He is particularly associated with the analysis of power and knowledge, and his work has had a profound influence on many fields, including literary theory, sociology, and philosophy. He wrote several influential books, such as Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Michel Foucault on power, knowledge, education.

Top 10 Michel Foucault Quotes

1. 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.
2. Where there is power, there is resistance.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.
6. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.
7. Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
8. Domination is not that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over others, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society.
9. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.
10. Power is everywhere...because it comes from everywhere.

Michel Foucault Image Quotes

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. — Michel Foucault

Power is everywhere...because it comes from everywhere. — Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault Short Quotes

• The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body
• Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.
• Visibility is a trap.
• The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.
• Believe what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
• Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.
• Unreason is in the same relation to reason as dazzlement to the brightness of daylight itself.
• We are freer than we think.
• One cannot attend to oneself, take care of oneself, without a relationship to another person.
• I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.

Michel Foucault Quotes About Power

The university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class. — Michel Foucault

...it's my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces. — Michel Foucault

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

If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost. — Michel Foucault

Since the Fall, man had accepted labor as a penance and for its power to work redemption. It was not a law of nature which forced man to work, but the effect of a curse. — Michel Foucault

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

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

It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time — Michel Foucault

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. — Michel Foucault

[L]et us say that we are obliged to produce the truth by the power that demands truth and needs it in order to function: we are forced to tell the truth, we are constrained, we are condemned to admit the truth or to discover it. — Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault Quotes About Knowledge

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

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

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. — Michel Foucault

If those arrangements [the fundamental arrangements of knowledge] were to disappear as they appeared... then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. — Michel Foucault

People will be surprised at the eagerness with which we went aboutpretending to rouse from its slumber a sexuality which every­thing-our discourses, our customs, our institutions, our regulations, our knowledges-was busy producing in the light of day and broadcasting to noisy accompaniment. — Michel Foucault

There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations — Michel Foucault

Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. — Michel Foucault

Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting. — Michel Foucault

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

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

Michel Foucault Quotes About Art

Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life? — Michel Foucault

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. — Michel Foucault

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. — Michel Foucault

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

Michel Foucault Quotes About History

You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from a lazar house, he becomes infuriated. — Michel Foucault

Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history — Michel Foucault

Man is a thinking being. The way he thinks is related to society, politics, economics, and history and is also related to very general and universal categories and formal structures. But thought is something other than societal relations. — Michel Foucault

The way people really think is not adequately analyzed by the universal categories of logic. Between social history and formal analyses of thought there is a path, a lane - maybe very narrow - which is the path of the historian of thought. — Michel Foucault

My role - and that is too emphatic a word - is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. — Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault Quotes About Society

Total surveillance is increasingly the general condition of society as a whole. — Michel Foucault

Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance. — Michel Foucault

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. — Michel Foucault

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. — Michel Foucault

What is peculiar to modern societies is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret. — Michel Foucault

The political and social processes by which the Western European societies were put in order are not very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are part of our most familiar landscape, and we don't perceive them anymore. But most of them once scandalized people. — Michel Foucault

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. — Michel Foucault

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

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

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

Michel Foucault Quotes About Institutions

I believe that political power exercises itself through the mediation of a certain number of institutions which look as if they have nothing in common with the political power, and as if they are independent of it, while they are not. — Michel Foucault

If I won a few billion in the lottery, I would create an institute where people who would like to die would come spend a weekend, a week, or a month in pleasure, under drugs perhaps, in order to disappear afterward, as if erased. — Michel Foucault

Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people. — Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

...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

'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

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. — Michel Foucault

Power is everywhere...because it comes from everywhere. — Michel Foucault

Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy into a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. — Michel Foucault

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

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

The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library. — Michel Foucault

A critique does not consist in saying that things aren't good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based... To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy. — Michel Foucault

Sexual behavior is not, as is too often assumed, a superimposition of, on the one hand, desires which derive from natural instincts, and, on the other hand, of permissive or restrictive laws which tell us what we should or shouldn't do. Sexual behavior is more than that. — Michel Foucault

The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence. — Michel Foucault

Politics is not what it pretends to be, the expression of a collective will. Politics breathes well only where this will is multiple, hesitant, confused, and obscure even to itself. — Michel Foucault

Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise. — Michel Foucault

Chance does not speak essentially through words nor can it be seen in their convolution. It is the eruption of language, its sudden appearance. It's not a night twinkle with stars, an illuminated sleep, nor a drowsy vigil. It is the very edge of consciousness. — Michel Foucault

I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me. — Michel Foucault

Perhaps [transgression] is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity. — Michel Foucault

The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the outlaw, the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order. — Michel Foucault

Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments. — Michel Foucault

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. — Michel Foucault

I'm very proud that some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist. — Michel Foucault

Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. — Michel Foucault

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

Penal law was not created by the common people, nor by the peasantry, nor by the proletariat, but entirely by the bourgeoisie as an important tactical weapon in this system of divisions which they wished to introduce. — Michel Foucault

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. — Michel Foucault

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. — Michel Foucault

It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticise and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them. — Michel Foucault

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

Relations of power "are indissociable from a discourse of truth, and they can neither be established nor function unless a true discourse is produced, accumulated, put into circulation, and set to work. Power cannot be exercised unless a certain economy of discourses of truth functions in, on the basis of, and thanks to, that power." — Michel Foucault

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

Methodologically speaking, the rejection by [John] Boswell of the categorical opposition between homosexual and heterosexual, which plays such a significant role in the way our culture conceives of homosexuality, represents an advance not only in scholarship but in cultural criticism as well. — Michel Foucault

Politics and the economy are not things that exist, or illusions, or ideologies. They are things that do not exist and yet which are inscribed in reality and fall under a regime of truth dividing the true and the false. — Michel Foucault

People can tolerate two homosexuals they see leaving together, but the next day they're smiling, holding hands, tenderly embracing one another, then they cannot be forgiven. It is not the departure for pleasure that is unacceptable, it is waking up happy. — Michel Foucault

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

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

For millenia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his exitence as a living being in question. — Michel Foucault

In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, man's dispute with madness was dramatic debate in which he confronted the secret powers of the world; the experience of madness was clouded by images of the Fall and the Will of God, of the Beast and the Metamorphosis, and of all the marvelous secrets of Knowledge — Michel Foucault

There is object proof that homosexuality is more interesting than heterosexuality. It's that one knows a considerable number of heterosexuals who would wish to become homosexuals, whereas one knows very few homosexuals who would really like to become heterosexuals. — Michel Foucault

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. — Michel Foucault

It is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its dominion; death is power's limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most private. — Michel Foucault

My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper - and pessimistic - activism. — Michel Foucault

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. — Michel Foucault

I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal and so on. — Michel Foucault

Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action. — Michel Foucault

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. — Michel Foucault

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

Waiting is directed at nothing: any object that could gratify it would only efface it. Still, it is not confined to one place, it is not a resigned immobility; it has the endurance of a movement that will never end and would never promise itself the reward of rest; it does not wrap itself in interiority; all of it falls irremediably outside. — Michel Foucault

One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. (When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverts it, one has an ideological production.) The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning. — Michel Foucault

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. — Michel Foucault

there is no glory in punishing — Michel Foucault

The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play). — Michel Foucault

There are moments in life where the question of knowing whether one might think otherwise than one thinks and perceive otherwise than one sees is indispensable if one is to continue to observe or reflect... What is philosophy today... if it does not consist in, instead of legitimizing what we already know, undertaking to know how and how far it might be possible to think otherwise? — Michel Foucault

Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence. — Michel Foucault

Matthey, a Geneva physician very close to Rousseau's influence, formulates the prospect for all men of reason: 'Do not glory in your state, if you are wise and civilized men; an instant suffices to disturb and annihilate that supposed wisdom of which you are so proud; an unexpected event, a sharp and sudden emotion of the soul will abruptly change the most reasonable and intelligent man into a raving idiot. — Michel Foucault

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

It is one of my targets to show people that a lot of things that are part of their landscape - that people are universal - are the result of some very precise historical changes. All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made. — Michel Foucault

The soul is the prison of the body. — Michel Foucault

For a long time, I have been trying to see if it would be possible to describe the history of thought as distinct both from the history of ideas (by which I mean the analysis of systems of representation) and from the history of mentalities (by which I mean the analysis of attitudes and types of action sch — Michel Foucault

A law which excludes all dialectic and all reconciliation; which establishes, consequently, both the flawless unity of knowledge and the uncompromising division of tragic existence; it rules over a world without twilight, which knows no effusion, nor the attenuated cares of lyricism; everything must be either waking or dream, truth or darkness, the light of being or the nothingness of shadow. — Michel Foucault

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

We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it isgood-and that is the real theater-totranscend them in the manner of play, bymeans of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair,to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put "inplay," show up, transform and reversethe systems which quietly order us about. — Michel Foucault

Life Lessons by Michel Foucault

1. Michel Foucault taught us to question the power structures in our society and to think critically about the way we are governed.
2. He emphasized the importance of understanding the history of our societies in order to better understand our present and shape our future.
3. He also highlighted the importance of understanding our own subjectivity, and the need to challenge the norms and conventions that we take for granted.