304 Quotes by Michel Foucault

The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness.

Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night’s hallucinations and the non-being of light’s judgments.

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.

In short, the history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the interruption of events in favour of stable structures.

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.

Poder y placer no se anulan; no se vuelven el uno contra el otro; se persiguen, se encabalgan y reactivan. Se.

Hence, too, my main concern will be to locate the forms of power, the channels it takes, and the discourses it permeates in order to reach the most tenuous and individual modes of behavior, the paths that give it access to the rare or scarcely perceivable forms of desire, how it penetrates and controls everyday pleasure – all this entailing effects that may be those of refusal, blockage, and invalidation, but also incitement and intensification: in short, the “polymorphous techniques of power.

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

The nineteenth century and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of “perversions.” Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities.