304 Quotes by Michel Foucault

Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

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.

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.

We demand that sex speak the truth and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves wich we think we possess in our immediate consciousness.

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

Truth is not by nature free-nor error servile-its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.

...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.

Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.

there is no glory in punishing