Michel Foucault Quotes

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone, you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone, you leave it to a torrent of change.

History is like a constantly changing tree.

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new; when an age ends; and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.

One of the reasons that change takes place is that the people who produce it believe change can take place.

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.

I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

Men live in history as never before …. we make and change history minute by minute. History is not the book or the human memory. We do history in the morning and change it after lunch.

The world we want to transform has already been worked on by history and is largely hollow. We must nevertheless be inventive enough to change it and build a new world.

History is moving in zig-zags and by roundabout ways.

I would like to see evolution in my country, not revolution. It is much better for us to work together with the government to transform Saudi Arabia for the future.

We are not starting a revolution. We are starting an evolution of change.

We're in the midst of an evolution, not a revolution.

For changes to be of any true value, they've got to be lasting and consistent.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.

Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides.

Sometimes - history needs a push.

I am only doing now what I have ever done; and ever will continue to do - that is adapting past experience to present reform in the light of high ideals and future objects.

You can't sit on the lid of progress. If you do, you will be blown to pieces.

Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be, as the egg is to the fowl; we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.

The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.