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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

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

More quotes by Michel Foucault

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If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.
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Domination is not that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over others, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society.
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The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.
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The gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates.
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The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy the soul is the prison of the body
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'The prison' begins well before its doors. It begins as soon as you leave your house - and even before.
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From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.
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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.
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...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.
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Since the Fall, man had accepted labor as a penance and for its power to work redemption. It was not a law of nature which forced man to work, but the effect of a curse.
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Methodologically speaking, the rejection by [John] Boswell of the categorical opposition between homosexual and heterosexual, which plays such a significant role in the way our culture conceives of homosexuality, represents an advance not only in scholarship but in cultural criticism as well.
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I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal and so on.
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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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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
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It is meaningless to speak in the name of - or against - Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.
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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I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.
Michel Foucault
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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.
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Where there is power, there is resistance.
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'Truth' is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of truth.
Michel Foucault