Quotes by Michel Foucault

• Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.
• 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.
• The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.
• Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
• 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.
• Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.
• In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.
• 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.
• Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.
• As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
• As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.