Michel Foucault Quotes

We have fought long and hard to escape from medieval superstition. I, for one, do not wish to go back.

As soon as laws are necessary for men, they are no longer fit for freedom.

For even the ordinary well-read person, the French Enlightenment is largely restricted to the three big-name philosophes: Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire.

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

Clearly, Enlightenment thinkers were seeking a God substitute.

Freedom is not the same as lack of accountability.

When your response to everything that is wrong with the world is to say, 'there ought to be a law,' you are saying that you hold freedom very cheap.

Whatever else we may say of our own age, for good or evil, nobody is likely to call it an Age of Reason.

Man can know his world without falling back on revelation; he can live his life without feeling his utter dependence on supernatural powers.

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

Now, there's a desire for order, authority coming from a feeling that society has gone too far to the side of individualism and liberalism.

For three hundred years we have had our focus on the individual. We have distinguished him from the objective world as the Middle Ages did not think of doing. We have given him the world and the universe as a playground for exploration and discovery.

We know we need civilization and laws and procedures, but isn't it frustrating? Wouldn't it be great if we could just do what we needed to do?

I'm very much an Enlightenment kind of guy.

They defined what was private and what was public and they would move it whenever they wished.

We don't really like rules. We think, in some way, they are an infringement of liberty.

If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.

Liberalism is a most important by-product of Rationalism, and its origins and ideology must be clearly shown.

And government's only role is to secure our rights for us.

Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint.

The Enlightenment was an attempt to liberate myth and base truth claims on evidence, not just dogma. But when science threw out the church, they threw out the baby with the bath water.

The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.

Rather than being any longer a threat to the established … order, Christianity became what practically all this earth's religions, launched in the name of spiritual enlightenment and freedom, have also become: a powerful way of perpetuating that order.

There are two visions of America. One precedes our founding fathers and finds its roots in the harshness of our puritan past. It is very suspicious of freedom, uncomfortable with diversity, hostile to science, unfriendly to reason, contemptuous of personal autonomy. It sees America as a religious nation. It views patriotism as allegiance to God. It secretly adores coercion and conformity. Despite our constitution, despite the legacy of the Enlightenment, it appeals to millions of Americans and threatens our freedom. The other vision finds its roots in the spirit of our founding revolution and in the leaders of this nation who embraced the age of reason. It loves freedom, encourages diversity, embraces science and affirms the dignity and rights of every individual. It sees America as a moral nation, neither completely religious nor completely secular. It defines patriotism as love of country and of the people who make it strong. It defends all citizens against unjust coercion and irrational conformity.