Michel Foucault Quotes

In madness, I thought I was the most important person in the world.

Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?

We're all not quite as sane as we pretend to be.

In describing one way of going mad, I shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world.

First sign of madness, talking to your own head.

My name is Stephen Leeds, and I am perfectly sane. My hallucinations, however, are all quite mad.

Insanity is believing your hallucinations are real. Religion is believing that other peoples' hallucinations are real.

Life becomes fully understandable only the moment we realise that we are all mad.

I might really have gone round the bend. I mean people who get visions and see a gigantic light descend on them from the sky can't be all there but if so I feel mighty happy. If one is happy and cracked it's much better than being unhappy and sane.

The problem with being nuts, she thought, is that you don't always feel as if you're nuts. Sometimes, in fact, you feel perfectly sane, and there just happens to be a trailer-shaped dragon crouching in the lot next door.

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.

Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And-how many of us do know it? ... Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up. I suppose only a few are aware of all this. Isolated persons here and there. But the broad masses-what do they think? All these hundreds of thousands in this city, here. Do they imagine that they live in a sane world? Or do they guess, glimpse, the truth...?

A man might pass for insane who should see things as they are.

Embrace beautiful lies - the chronic insanity of the sane

In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.

There are worse things than being mad.

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?

Belane, are you nuts?" Who knows? Insanity is comparative. Who sets the norm?

He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.

When you lose your mind, you'll come to your senses.

Now this is the point. You fancy me a mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded.

Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.

Without madness what is man But a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets?

Weren't we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of our neighbor's children?

Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?