Michel Foucault Quotes

There are reasons to have rules and regulations. That I understand. Authority is a different thing. Authority is to maintain its own position by increasing its power and domination over those people it is supposedly protecting.

Whenever you have people in power, they try to control people. It's not necessarily a bad thing to control people - you can control people for good, you can control people for bad, but you're gonna try and control people.

The people are drugged with religion; and that's why the elites - who understand that it is just a ritual, and understand the truth of it but won't teach the truth of it to awaken the masses of the people: so, the leaders live in luxury at the expense of the weak, at the expense of the poor.

Violence must be inflicted once for all; people will then forget what it tastes like and so be less resentful. Benefits must be conferred gradually; and in that way they will taste better.

George Orwell said, "Whoever controls the past controls the future," by which he meant that history is incredibly important in shaping the world view of the next generation of people.

People only respond to fear.

Climate change is not about climate change. It's about the people in it getting rich off of an ever-expanding, growing, controlling government. It's all about expanding the government and government control over people. It's about creating victims. When you successfully turn somebody into a victim, you have automatically made them a dependent on you. You are essentially telling them they have lost the power necessary to solve their own problems. And you create within them a mentality that they can't overcome their own problem because they're victims.

I'm interested in politics, what's going on in the world, how people behave and how your life is often in the hands of other people.

All the common people want is to be left alone. All the ordinary soldier wants is to collect his pay and not get killed. That's why the great forces of history can be manipulated by astonishingly small groups of determined people.

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.

Millions of people are getting the vote, and we have to educate them to keep them from our throats. In other words, we have to train them in obedience and servility, so they're not going to think through the way the world works and come after our throats.

Anger makes people feel uncomfortable, because the minute somebody shows it, it puts you in a position where you can't laugh or make light of something... not to trivialise it I don't mean. But your reaction to anger is supposed to be fear or returned anger. So, you're really trying to control a situation when you show anger and it's a very weak position to take. It often works on people who aren't in a position to fight back.

It's like suddenly in the Middle Ages, people figured men should be in charge of women's bodies since they were in charge of pretty much everything else

I know now why confusion in government is not only tolerated but encouraged. I have learned. A confused people can make no clear demands.

A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act, and without pangs of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.

Religion is often politics made sacred.

The Oscars demonstrate the will of the people to control and judge those they have elected to stand above them (much, perhaps, as in bygone days, an election celebrated the same).

If people disobey, don't ask what is wrong with them, ask what's wrong with their leaders.

Authoritarians tend to consolidate support by using fear, but more importantly by driving a wedge among the people that they want to control.

The value of making young people stupid, subject to an educational deficit has enormous currency in a society in which existing relations of power are normalized. Under such conditions, those who hold power accountable are reviewed as treasonous while critically engaged young people are denounced as un-American.

Unconsciously, perhaps, we treasure the power we have over people by their regard for our opinion of them, and we hate those upon whom we have no such influence.

How do you prevent people from doing inappropriate things? We can write laws. But at the end of the day, I actually wonder what the board was doing.

I guess that is the strange part of the human brain that people have studied for eons - is hatred and self-hatred. You can convince people that the problem is not coming from the top but is, rather, being created by the people who are being oppressed.

But remember, this power of the people on top depends on the obedience of the people below. When people stop obeying, they have no power.