Michel Foucault Quotes

People should decide on the books' meanings for themselves. They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence.

Belief is tricky because left to its own devices, it can court a kind of surety, an unquestioning allegiance that fears doubt and destroys difference.

The Potter books in general are a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for an end to bigotry. And I think it's one of the reasons that some people don't like the books, but I think that's it's a very healthy message to pass on to younger people that you should question authority and you should not assume that the establishment or the press tells you all of the truth.

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

Those who agree with us may not be right, but we admire their astuteness.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

Be open-minded and available to everything and not just saying it's Jesus Christ or bust. So much of the world will do that. I find it troubling... Don't be dogmatic.

Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has the right to be wrong in his facts.

Perhaps the society has been too quick to understand and too slow to condemn.

If we learn from those only, of whose lives and opinions we altogether approve, we shall have to turn from many of the highest and profoundest minds.

He who is master of all opinions can never be the bigot of any.

I am not so enamored of my own opinions that I disregard what others may think of them

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

Communism everywhere has paid the price of rigidity and dogmatism. Freedom has the strength of compassion and flexibility. It has, above all, the strength of intellectual honesty.

One cannot be dogmatic about the right solution.

I am very cautious of people who are absolutely right, especially when they are vehemently so.

A candid spirit is mightier than the most persistent dogmatism.

I'd ask people to keep in mind the idea that if you really understand something, it's even more important for you to consider the possibility of your wrongness. Even if it takes someone dumber than you to point that out.

We tolerate differences of opinion in people who are familiar to us. But differences of opinion in people we do not know sound like heresy or plots.

I would give my life for a man who is looking for the truth. But I would gladly kill a man who thinks that he has found the truth.

Listening to people espouse beliefs different from mine is informative, not threatening, because the only thing that can alter my worldview is a new and undeniable truth, and contrary to what Jack Nicholson says in 'A Few Good Men', "I CAN handle the truth.

If you're always in the company of people who agree with you, you're going to think of people who don't agree with you as venal or stupid. I constantly tell my students that if they're in the company of people who always say "amen" to what you say, find other company. And that is the source of illiberalism, when you are unable to listen to someone who thinks differently. That's when democracies are in trouble.

I want to inspire people to really open up their minds and not be one-sided or biased or hypocritical.

I don't want people to judge books by their cover, I want people to be open minded to the rest of the world.

I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society.