Michel Foucault Quotes

It is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.

A human being is a naturally political [animal].

Thus society is born, as something required by nature, and (because this nature is human nature) as something accomplished through a work of reason and will, and freely consented to. Man is a political animal, which means that the human person craves political life, communal life, not only with regard to the family community, but with regard to the civil community.

It is very doubtful whether man is enough of a political animal to produce a good, sensible, serious and efficient constitution. All the evidence is against it.

Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose; and for thepurpose of making mana political animal she has endowed him alone among the animals with the power of reasoned speech.

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

What am I? Do I know? I am a man: quite simply, a 'breather.'

Man is ... a political animal.

Hemingway has expressed with genius the terrors of the modern man at the danger of losing control of his world

I am a political animal.

All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.

But man is above all a social and political animal; his relations with his fellow human beings form his most absorbing and important interest.

All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest.

Man is the only animal who does not feel at home in nature, who can feel evicted from paradise, the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem that he has to solve and from which he cannot escape. He cannot go back to the prehuman state of harmony with nature, and he does not know where he will arrive if he goes forward. Man's existential contradiction results in a state of constant disequilibrium. This disequilibrium distinguishes him from the animal, which lives, as it were, in harmony with nature.

Islam as a religion focuses primarily on the immutable aspects of life and existence, whereas a political system concerns only social aspects of our worldly life.

MAN IS FUNDAMENTALLY AN ANIMAL. Animals, as distinct from man, are not machine-like, not sadistic; their societies, within the same species, are incomparably more peaceful than those of man. The basic question, then is: What has made the animal, man, degenerate into a machine?

Laws themselves, political Constitutions, are not our Life; but only the house wherein our Life is led.

man is by nature designed to live in the polis, the highest form of koinonia, community; that is man's end or goal if he achieves the full potentiality of his nature.

Over the years I've never written or made movies about political themes 'cause while they do have current critical importance, in the large, large scheme of things, only the big questions matter and the answers to those big questions are very, very depressing.

To model our political system upon speculations of lasting tranquility, is to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character.

Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow'st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Here's three on's are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more than such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.

Man is the only animal that can be bored.

Who but the mad would choose to keep on living? In the end, aren't we all just a little crazy?

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

Vivre est un maladie dont le sommeil nous soulage toutes les 16 heures. C'est un pallatif. La mort est le remede.