304 Quotes by Michel Foucault

Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with it’s thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything.

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.

Sadism... is a massive cultural fact that appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century and that constitutes one of the greatest conversions of the occidental imagination... madness of desire, the insane delight of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite.

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.

How could the disciplines and the power that functions in them appear arbitrary, when they merely operate the mechanisms of justice itself, even with a view to mitigating their intensity?

The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

After Sade, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of darkness, which we are now attempting to recover... in our discourse, in our freedom, in our thought.

When man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world; the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of privation is his own nature, which will lay bare hell’s pitiless truth.

The manifest discourse, therefore, is really no more than the repressive presence of what it does not say; and this ‘not-said’ is a hollow that undermines from within all that is said.