List of Michel Foucault Quotes

A Way Of Life Can Be Shared Among Individuals Of Different Ages, Status, And Social Activity. It Can Yield Intense Relations Not Resembling Those That Are Institutionalized. It Seems To Me That A Way Of Life Can Yield A Culture And An Ethics. To Be "gay," I Think, Is Not To Identify With The Psychological Traits And The Visible Masks Of The Homosexual But To Try And Define And Develop A Way Of Life.

Chance Does Not Speak Essentially Through Words Nor Can It Be Seen In Their Convolution. It Is The Eruption Of Language, Its Sudden Appearance. It's Not A Night Twinkle With Stars, An Illuminated Sleep, Nor A Drowsy Vigil. It Is The Very Edge Of Consciousness.

During The Years 1945-1965 (i Am Referring To Europe), There Was A Certain Way Of Thinking Correctly, A Certain Style Of Politicaldiscourse, A Certain Ethics Of The Intellectual. One Had To Be On Familiar Terms With Marx, Not Let One's Dreams Stray Too Far From Freud.... These Were Therequirements That Made The Strange Occupation Of Writing And Speaking A Measure Of Truth About Oneself And One's Time Acceptable.

The Court Is The Bureaucracy Of The Law. If You Bureaucratise Popular Justice Then You Give It The Form Of A Court.

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.

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?

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.

[john Boswell] Introduction Of The Concept Of "gay" (in The Way He Defines It) Provides Us Both With A Useful Instrument Of Research And At The Same Time A Better Comprehension Of How People Actually Conceive Of Themselves And Their Sexual Behavior.

I Think I Have In Fact Been Situated In Most Of The Squares On The Political Checkerboard, One After Another And Sometimes Simultaneously: As Anarchist, Leftist, Ostentatious Or Disguised Marxist, Nihilist, Explicit Or Secret Anti-marxist, Technocrat In The Service Of Gaullism, New Liberal And So On.

A Law Which Excludes All Dialectic And All Reconciliation; Which Establishes, Consequently, Both The Flawless Unity Of Knowledge And The Uncompromising Division Of Tragic Existence; It Rules Over A World Without Twilight, Which Knows No Effusion, Nor The Attenuated Cares Of Lyricism; Everything Must Be Either Waking Or Dream, Truth Or Darkness, The Light Of Being Or The Nothingness Of Shadow.

Confined On The Ship, From Which There Is No Escape, The Madman Is Delivered To The River With Its Thousand Arms, The Sea With Its Thousand Roads, To That Great Uncertainty External To Everything. He Is A Prisoner In The Midst Of What Is The Freest, The Openest Of Routes: Bound Fast At The Infinite Crossroads. He Is The Passenger Par Excellence: That Is, The Prisoner Of The Passage. And The Land He Will Come To Is Unknown—as Is, Once He Disembarks, The Land From Which He Comes. He Has His Truth And His Homeland Only In That Fruitless Expanse Between Two Countries That Cannot Belong To Him.

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.