Quotes by Michel Foucault

“The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power. In the seventeenth century, and even in the early eighteenth century, it was not, therefore, with all its theatre of terror,...”

“In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.”

“The game is worthwhile in so far as we don't know what will be the end.”

“Government is the right disposition of things.”

“In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject consta...”

“[T]hus one should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated. Where there is desire, the power rel...”

“In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one 'episteme' that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in theory or silently invested in a ...”

“The child is more individualised than the adult, the patient more than the healthy man, the madman and the delinquent more than the normal and the non-delinquent. In each case, it is towards the fi...”

“There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze that each individual under its weight will end by [internalising] to the point that they ...”

“Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the fu...”

“Through the various discourses, legal sanctions against minor perversions were multiplied; sexual irregularity was annexed to mental illness; from childhood to old age, a norm of sexual development...”

“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 e...”

“For was this transformation of sex into discourse not governed by the endeavor to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction: to say no t...”

“People will be surprised at the eagerness with which we went aboutpretending to rouse from its slumber a sexuality which everything-our discourses, our customs, our institutions, our regulations, o...”

“We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it isgood-and that is the real theater-totranscend them in the manner of play, bymeans...”

“Curiosity evokes concern; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiar...”

“The marvellous logic of the mad which seems to mock that of the logicians because it resembles it so exactly, or rather because it is exactly the same, and because at the secret heart of madness, a...”

“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 ...”

“All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of...”

“But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.”