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Politics is not what it pretends to be, the expression of a collective will. Politics breathes well only where this will is multiple, hesitant, confused, and obscure even to itself.

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
Expression
Hesitant
Politics
Breathes
Wells
Collectives
Well
Obscure
Even
Collective
Multiple
Confused
Breathe
Pretends

More quotes by Michel Foucault

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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.
Michel Foucault
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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
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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
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I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.
Michel Foucault
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It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.
Michel Foucault
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But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.
Michel Foucault
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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
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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
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Search for what is good and strong and beautiful in your society and elaborate from there. Push outward. Always create from what you already have. Then you will know what to do.
Michel Foucault
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Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ?
Michel Foucault
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Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth.
Michel Foucault
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...if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing
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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The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.
Michel Foucault
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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.
Michel Foucault
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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
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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.
Michel Foucault
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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
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My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad.
Michel Foucault
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Relations of power are indissociable from a discourse of truth, and they can neither be established nor function unless a true discourse is produced, accumulated, put into circulation, and set to work. Power cannot be exercised unless a certain economy of discourses of truth functions in, on the basis of, and thanks to, that power.
Michel Foucault