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Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.

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
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More quotes by Michel Foucault

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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
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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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In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.
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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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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We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them.
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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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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Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse.
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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Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.
Michel Foucault
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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
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Madness is the absolute break with the work of art it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.
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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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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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
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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.
Michel Foucault
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The soul is the prison of the body.
Michel Foucault
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What is peculiar to modern societies is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.
Michel Foucault
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Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ?
Michel Foucault