Quote

The first task of the doctor is ... political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government. Man will be totally and definitively cured only if he is first liberated.

Michel Foucault

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Mišel Fuko
Struggle
Liberated
War
Doctor
Political
Task
Government
Tasks
Firsts
Doctors
First
Totally
Must
Disease
Definitively
Men
Begin
Cured

More quotes by Michel Foucault

Image
There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations
Michel Foucault
Image
It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent to criticise and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.
Michel Foucault
Image
There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.
Michel Foucault
Image
Politics is not what it pretends to be, the expression of a collective will. Politics breathes well only where this will is multiple, hesitant, confused, and obscure even to itself.
Michel Foucault
Image
The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge.
Michel Foucault
Image
In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.
Michel Foucault
Image
...it's my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.
Michel Foucault
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.
Michel Foucault
Image
It is meaningless to speak in the name of - or against - Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.
Michel Foucault
Image
Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life?
Michel Foucault
Image
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, our knowledges-was busy producing in the light of day and broadcasting to noisy accompaniment.
Michel Foucault
Image
Power is everywhere...because it comes from everywhere.
Michel Foucault
Image
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
Image
And now, if we try to assign a value, in and of itself, outside its relations to the dream and with error, to classical unreason, we must understand it not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled.
Michel Foucault
Image
One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge.
Michel Foucault
Image
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.
Michel Foucault
Image
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 constantly disappears.
Michel Foucault
Image
The gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates.
Michel Foucault