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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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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
Human
Useless
Humans
Sight
Reach
Things
Beings
Necessary
Secret
Placed
Within
Secrets
Nature
Keeping

More quotes by Michel Foucault

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Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise.
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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In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, man's dispute with madness was dramatic debate in which he confronted the secret powers of the world the experience of madness was clouded by images of the Fall and the Will of God, of the Beast and the Metamorphosis, and of all the marvelous secrets of Knowledge
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To change something in the minds of people - that's the role of an intellectual.
Michel Foucault
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'The prison' begins well before its doors. It begins as soon as you leave your house - and even before.
Michel Foucault
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The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.
Michel Foucault
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The soul is the prison of the body.
Michel Foucault
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We demand that sex speak the truth and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves wich we think we possess in our immediate consciousness.
Michel Foucault
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Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life?
Michel Foucault
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Power is everywhere...because it comes from everywhere.
Michel Foucault
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I belong to that generation who, as students, had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism. For me the break was first Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance.
Michel Foucault
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[L]et us say that we are obliged to produce the truth by the power that demands truth and needs it in order to function: we are forced to tell the truth, we are constrained, we are condemned to admit the truth or to discover it.
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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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
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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
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The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy the soul is the prison of the body
Michel Foucault
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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
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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.
Michel Foucault
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Relations of power are indissociable from a discourse of truth, and they can neither be established nor function unless a true discourse is produced, accumulated, put into circulation, and set to work. Power cannot be exercised unless a certain economy of discourses of truth functions in, on the basis of, and thanks to, that power.
Michel Foucault
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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.
Michel Foucault