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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
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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
Success
Tolerable
Part
Substantial
Power
Mechanism
Mask
Hide
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Conditions
Proportional
Ability
Mechanisms
More quotes by Michel Foucault
The gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates.
Michel Foucault
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
I'm very proud that some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist.
Michel Foucault
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
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
Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life?
Michel Foucault
It is meaningless to speak in the name of - or against - Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.
Michel Foucault
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.
Michel Foucault
Where there is power, there is resistance.
Michel Foucault
If I won a few billion in the lottery, I would create an institute where people who would like to die would come spend a weekend, a week, or a month in pleasure, under drugs perhaps, in order to disappear afterward, as if erased.
Michel Foucault
[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
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
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
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
You may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying, you will make a man that will live longer than he.
Michel Foucault
It is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its dominion death is power's limit, the moment that escapes it death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most private.
Michel Foucault
'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
A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.
Michel Foucault
Where can an interrogation lead us which does not follow reason in its horizontal course, but seeks to retrace in time that constant vertically which confronts European culture with what it is not?
Michel Foucault
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