304 Quotes by Michel Foucault

  • Author Michel Foucault
  • Quote

    For the madness of men is a divine spectacle: “In fact, could one make observations from the Moon, as did Menippus, considering the numberless agitations of the Earth, one would think one saw a swarm of flies or gnats fighting among themselves, struggling and laying traps, stealing from one another, playing, gamboling, falling, and dying, and one would not believe the troubles, the tragedies that were produced by such a minute animalcule destined to perish so shortly.

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  • Author Michel Foucault
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    It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by a functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished – and in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized, over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives.

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  • Author Michel Foucault
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    Do not acid vapors have the very properties of melancholia, whereas alcoholic vapors, always ready to burst into flame, suggest frenzy; and sulfurous vapors, agitated by a violent and continuous movement, indicate mania?

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  • Author Michel Foucault
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    In order to fix the vocabulary, let us say that we will call knowledge-connaissance the system that allows desire and knowledge-savoir to be given a prior unity, reciprocal belonging, and co-naturalness. And we will call knowledge-savoir that which we have to drag from the interiority of knowledge-connaissance in order to rediscover in it the object of a willing, the end of a desire, the instrument of a domination, the stake of a struggle.

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  • Author Michel Foucault
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    From the point of view of wealth, there is no difference between need, comfort and pleasure.

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  • Author Michel Foucault
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    It is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies.

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  • Author Michel Foucault
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    From being the object of a religious experience and sanctified, poverty became the object of a moral conception that condemned.

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  • Author Michel Foucault
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    The corollary of the possibility of conceiving other worlds – this one being, de facto, only a domain – is the impossibility of moving beyond the world we inhabit and the imperious necessity of accepting its frontiers as limits.

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