Michel Foucault Quotes

We should not be content to say that power has a need for such-and-such a discovery, such-and-such a form of knowledge, but we should add that the exercise of power itself creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information. ... The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power. ... It is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power.

When you're rich and famous you are the dominant force in a relationship, even if you try hard not to be. I've talked of sacrificing everything for Fleetwood Mac, but I realize now that it is simply the only thing I've ever wanted to do.

White women love me 'cause of my edge. And I love white women.

Our deep desires define us, really.

I think it's poignant and powerful, this idea that if someone knows your name, they have the ability to kind of hail you and make demands upon you.

Black people have to define who we are, or others do it for us.

What they [ ruling elite] understand is that matters of desire, subjectivities, identities matter. And they take the cultural apparatuses that they control enormously, enormously, in an enormously important way.

Exercise power by means of kindness, and you may be causing more damage than you could by cruelty. Neither approach is correct.

Relations of power "are indissociable from a discourse of truth, and they can neither be established nor function unless a true discourse is produced, accumulated, put into circulation, and set to work. Power cannot be exercised unless a certain economy of discourses of truth functions in, on the basis of, and thanks to, that power."

Any power, of course, depends upon the values of the person exercising the power.

It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master

It is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others-for their use and to our detriment.

The less the power, the greater the desire to exercise 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.

One should try to locate power at the extreme of its exercise, where it is always less legal in character.

Content is an obstacle to the exercise of power.

Domination is not that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over others, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society.

The exercise of power in this century has meant for all of us in the United States not arrogance, but agony.

Our identity is fictional, written by parents, relatives, education, society.

It is unrealistic to think you can have an inflexible identity that never has to give or take or make compromises.

Neither should men study war with a view to the enslavement of those who do not deserve to be enslaved; but first of all they should provide against their own enslavement, and in the second place obtain empire for the good of the governed, and not for the sake of exercising a general despotism, and in the third place they should seek to be masters only over those who deserve to be slaves.

If you live life, then you become what are.

Growing up, I realized that fame is not what you think it is. It's a little bizarre. You have to learn how to cope with that and figure out who you are.

I try to be a partygoer. But at some point I don't know why I'm doing it and fall back. I've been using repression, the struggle between behaving as a social animal. You're seeking to be honest with your free will, less conflict. I think that's an important subject with me. That's who I am, how I was brought up. I think I use that a lot. I mistrust everything I think. Things you think you can trust, believe in, or hang on to, changes. That's the essence of life.

Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.