Michel Foucault Quotes

To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.

Power doesn't just exist. It is threaded through different mechanisms of control. I'm interested in those complexities. But I want to address that in very forthright language and sometimes with images.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being.

Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?

But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

What you're saying is that 'I, the superior elite, will take care of you.' Why? Because, you see, that superior, elite group needs to feel superior and elite. And they can't be superior and elite unless you have a whole lot of people down there groveling around. So you keep them down there by feeding them.

What we really need to be understanding is that all of these things matter and they all stem from the fact that certain people live with power and authority and they want to maintain it.

If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery.

The strong do what they have to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.

Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.

Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.

What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?

The one without a sword gets humiliated.

The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty, but to have a slave of his own.

There is no more contemptible poison than power over one's fellow men.

Power is being able to affect the hegemony of existing systems.

The natural course of power is to make the many slaves to the few.

Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for suppressing another.

Through the history of the world there have always been exploiters and exploited. There always will be ... because the great mass of men are made by nature to be slaves, they are unfit to control themselves, and for their own good need masters.

One of the most constant laws of history is … immediately [if] any one class becomes preponderant—nobles, clergy, army, or the people—it speedily tends to enslave others.

It is as much in the order of nature that men should enslave each other as that animals should prey upon each other.

Every organism, every human being, must conquer or serve.

However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four.