Michel Foucault Quotes

Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

Lunatics with money in America are never mad–just eccentric.

Is Mr. [John Quincy] Adams demented, or is he perversely wicked? Both, I think, and Adams ought to be confined to a hospital.

Between incomprehensible and incoherent sits the madhouse. I am not in the madhouse.

Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.

As for the demented, I hold it certain that all beings deprived of reason are thus afflicted only by the Devil.

The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

That's the terrible part. I swear to God I'm a madman.

Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant.

I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.

Plenty of crazy people in New York. There are so many crazy people here, I think it's like one out of every one person is completely out of their mind.

Insane!... Ask the tyrant who is his most dangerous foe, the sane man or the insane?

Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?

If the sleep of reason produces monsters, what does the sleep of unreason produce?

The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.

When you are insane, you are busy being insane-all the time ... when I was crazy, that was all I was.

The logic of a madman is a sane man's confusion.

The different sorts of madness are innumerable.

I'm cold as a razor blade, inches from madness.

I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats.

Madness has its own dynamism. It just goes on.

The fellow is either a madman or a poet.

I say, Watson,’ he whispered, ‘would you be afraid to sleep in the same room as a lunatic, a man with softening of the brain, an idiot whose mind has lost its grip?’ ‘Not in the least,’ I answered in astonishment. ‘Ah, that’s lucky,’ he said, and not another word would he utter that night.

He's right: They have to put madmen with madmen.