Quote

[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

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

More quotes by Michel Foucault

Image
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
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
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
Image
Power is everywhere...because it comes from everywhere.
Michel Foucault
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Sexual behavior is not, as is too often assumed, a superimposition of, on the one hand, desires which derive from natural instincts, and, on the other hand, of permissive or restrictive laws which tell us what we should or shouldn't do. Sexual behavior is more than that.
Michel Foucault
Image
You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from a lazar house, he becomes infuriated.
Michel Foucault
Image
To work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before
Michel Foucault
Image
The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.
Michel Foucault
Image
I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.
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
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
The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the outlaw, the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order.
Michel Foucault
Image
Political power goes much deeper than one suspects there are centres and invisible, little-known points of support its true resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn't expect it.
Michel Foucault
Image
The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.
Michel Foucault
Image
I'm not making a problem out of a personal question I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.
Michel Foucault
Image
There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say we must try to determine the different ways of not saying things.
Michel Foucault
Image
Power is not an institution, and not a structure neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.
Michel Foucault