Quote

Truth is not by nature free - nor error servile - but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.

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
MiĊĦel Fuko
Errors
Relation
Imbued
Free
Servile
Science
Thoroughly
Nature
Relations
Truth
Error
Power
Production
Productions

More quotes by Michel Foucault

Image
It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.
Michel Foucault
Image
Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.
Michel Foucault
Image
My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad.
Michel Foucault
Image
'The prison' begins well before its doors. It begins as soon as you leave your house - and even before.
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
It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time
Michel Foucault
Image
The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.
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
Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.
Michel Foucault
Image
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
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
The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy the soul is the prison of the body
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
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.
Michel Foucault
Image
Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.
Michel Foucault
Image
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
Image
[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
Image
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
Image
Power is everywhere...because it comes from everywhere.
Michel Foucault
Image
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