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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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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
Truth
Forced
Power
Admit
Needs
Discover
Function
Demand
Constrained
Produce
Condemned
Tell
Obliged
Order
Demands

More quotes by Michel Foucault

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Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life?
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When man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of privation is his own nature, which will lay bare hell's pitiless truth.
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The gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates.
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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.
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I believe that political power exercises itself through the mediation of a certain number of institutions which look as if they have nothing in common with the political power, and as if they are independent of it, while they are not.
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What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.
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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.
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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
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Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth.
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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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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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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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I'm not making a problem out of a personal question I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.
Michel Foucault
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The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.
Michel Foucault
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I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.
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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Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments.
Michel Foucault
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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.
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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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Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence.
Michel Foucault