Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Ability
Mechanisms
Success
Tolerable
Part
Substantial
Power
Mechanism
Mask
Hide
Condition
Conditions
Proportional
More quotes by 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
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
Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.
Michel Foucault
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
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
I'm not making a problem out of a personal question I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.
Michel Foucault
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
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
Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.
Michel Foucault
If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.
Michel Foucault
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
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
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.
Michel Foucault
The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.
Michel Foucault
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
To work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before
Michel Foucault
I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.
Michel Foucault
I belong to that generation who, as students, had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism. For me the break was first Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance.
Michel Foucault
My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper - and pessimistic - activism.
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
