Quotes by Michel Foucault

“Knowledge is not made for understanding it is made for cutting. ”

“This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thoughtour thought that bears the stamp of our age and ...”

“There has been so much action in the past, said D.H. Lawrence, especially sexual action, a wearying repetition over and over, without a corresponding thought, a corresponding realization. Now our b...”

“It may well be that we talk about sex more than anything else; we set our minds to the task; we convince ourselves that were have never said enough on the subject...where sex is concerned the most ...”

“I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.”

“Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what ...”

“With humanity, life has ended up with a living creature that never quite finds itself in the right place, a living creature destined to wander and endlessly make mistakes.”

“I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.”

“And if it is true that the image still has the function of speaking, of transmitting something consubstantial with language, we must recognize that it already no longer says the same thing; and tha...”

“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 ...”

“From the point of view of wealth, there is no difference between need, comfort and pleasure”

“It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappe...”

“Among the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things ... only one, which began a century and a half ago ... has allowed the figure of man to appear.”

“To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him...”

“The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works, he is a certain functional principle by which, in...”

“As a result, we must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author. We are accustomed, as we have seen earlier, to saying that the author is the genial creator of a work in which he deposits,...”

“Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, sacralized and sacralizing figures) to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent t...”

“It would seem that the authors name, unlike other proper names, does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it; instead, the name seems always to...”

“Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence....”

“What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?”