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Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.

Michel Foucault

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Michel Foucault
Age: 57 †
Born: 1926
Born: October 15
Died: 1984
Died: June 26
Anthropologist
Ethnologist
Historian
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Professor
Psychologist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Foucault
Michael Foucault
MiĊĦel Fuko
Person
Doubtless
Writing
Writes
Like
Remain
Asks
Face
Faces
Order
Persons

More quotes by Michel Foucault

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The soul is the prison of the body.
Michel Foucault
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Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.
Michel Foucault
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We must escape and help others to escape the two readymade formulas of the pure sexual encounter and the lovers' fusion of identities.
Michel Foucault
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The university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class.
Michel Foucault
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If I won a few billion in the lottery, I would create an institute where people who would like to die would come spend a weekend, a week, or a month in pleasure, under drugs perhaps, in order to disappear afterward, as if erased.
Michel Foucault
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Where can an interrogation lead us which does not follow reason in its horizontal course, but seeks to retrace in time that constant vertically which confronts European culture with what it is not?
Michel Foucault
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Resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous principles but neither are they a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of power they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite.
Michel Foucault
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My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper - and pessimistic - activism.
Michel Foucault
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At every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, what one is.
Michel Foucault
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My role - and that is too emphatic a word - is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed.
Michel Foucault
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I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.
Michel Foucault
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There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say we must try to determine the different ways of not saying things.
Michel Foucault
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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.
Michel Foucault
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It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.
Michel Foucault
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Perhaps [transgression] is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity.
Michel Foucault
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The political and social processes by which the Western European societies were put in order are not very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are part of our most familiar landscape, and we don't perceive them anymore. But most of them once scandalized people.
Michel Foucault
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There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.
Michel Foucault
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If those arrangements [the fundamental arrangements of knowledge] were to disappear as they appeared... then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
Michel Foucault
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Power is everywhere...because it comes from everywhere.
Michel Foucault
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Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth.
Michel Foucault