Michel Foucault Quotes

It is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime.

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.

Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.

Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.

Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and insight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.

People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do, but what they don’t know is what they do does.

Knowledge is not for knowing, knowledge is for cutting.

Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.

Madness is the false punishment of a false solution, but by its own virtue, it brings to light the real problem, which can then be truly resolved.

Government is the right disposition of things.