Michel Foucault Quotes

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

It is only by questioning what people take for granted, what people hold to be true, that we can break through the hypnosis of social conditioning.

A people are free in proportion as they form their own opinions.

Men are free and claim the right to think for themselves in religious as well as political matters.

People have rights and government must be kept from trampling on them.

Democracy is not a state in which people act like sheep. Under democracy individual liberty of opinion and action is jealously guarded ...

It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women?

The state is there to respect the freedom of each citizen to believe in what he or she wants to believe in.

… the best way to aid the human being to emancipate himself is to educate him

Do you call yourself Free? It is your ruling thought that I would hear, and not that you have escaped from a yoke.

Prejudice of the learned. - The learned judge correctly that people of all ages have believed they know what is good and evil, praise- and blameworthy. But it is a prejudice of the learned that we now know better than any other age.

I have often asked Americans wherein they consider their freedom superior to that of the English, but have never found them able to indicate a single point in which the individual is worse off in England as regards his private civil rights or his general liberty of doing and thinking as he pleases. They generally turn the discussion to social equality, the existence of a monarchy and hereditary titles and so forth - matters which are, of course, quite different from freedom in its proper sense.

Freedom is the very essence of our economy and society. Without freedom the human mind is prevented from unleashing its creative force. But what is also clear is that this freedom does not stand alone. It is freedom in responsibility and freedom to exercise responsibility.

It is true that liberty is not free, nor is it easy. But tyranny - even varying degrees of it - is much more difficult, and much more expensive. The time has come to rein in the federal government, put it on a crash diet, and let the people keep their money and their liberty.

You can't lay down laws for what people think and hope.

Freedom of the Spirit is the cornerstone of all freedom.

Government should stay the hell out of people's business.

The central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history.

What do we want for people? Human dignity, personal expression and fulfillment, justice, freedom.

[People] don't like the government telling them what to do or telling them how to live their lives.

Let every man be free to act from his own conscience; but let him remember that other people have consciences too; and let not his liberty be so expansive that in its indulgence it jars and crashes against the liberty of others.

There is always a choice." "You mean I could choose certain death?" "A choice nevertheless, or perhaps an alternative. You see I believe in freedom. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.

Being a conservative also used to involve the concept of people being free to do whatever they want to do, as long as it doesn't hurt somebody else. Conservatives used to be very libertarian.

I try and take everyone's ideals, common morals, flip them around, make people look at them differently, question them, so that you're not always taking things for granted.