Michel Foucault Quotes

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than politicians think.

The pessimism of the intellect is the starting point for struggle. It's not the end point, it's the starting point. You have to make something critical to make it meaningful, to make it transformative.

We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them.

As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.

Power is never so overwhelming that there's no room for resistance.

When there is a huge force pressing down on freedoms, sub-cultures with more creativity and power are likely to form.

Free thought is a virtue that cannot be crushed

The history of political movements in the African diaspora is that the solution to the problem is never in the hands of people who are advancing the movement. I try and operate on my own terms.

Politics lives in people, ideas live in people, they live in the concrete struggles that people have.

We need people to be alert and thinking for themselves and connected to each other and connected to that sense of hope and empowerment and radical chutzpah that the founding generation had and intended us to have.

The remarks that [Steven] Lerner gave at Pace University: "'Unions are almost dead. We cannot survive doing what we do but the simple fact of the matter is community organizations are almost dead also. And if you think about what we need to do it may give us some direction which is essentially what the folks that are in charge - the big banks and everything - what they want is stability.'" So we have "'to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement'".

You can tell people of the need to struggle, but when the powerless start to see that they really can make a difference, nothing can quench the fire.

If the government fails to listen to your demands, then you will decide what is best for you.

I think Robert F. Kennedy really, finally, cared; he realized that all of the rhetoric had to be put down into some form of action. That's perhaps the reason they killed him. They don't care what you say, you can say as much as you want to, provided you don't do anything. If you start to do something and your shuffling raises too much dust, they will disestablish you. That's what happened to Martin Luther King.

Optimism is a political act. Those who benefit from the status quo are perfectly happy for us to think nothing is going to get any better. In fact, these days, cynicism is obedience.

Toni Cade Bambara said: “Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.”

This is the power of the powerful to define, to structure, to say, 'This is the way the world works.' It's enormous power. Among the powers of the weak, I think the first one is the power not to believe the powerful.

If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power.

Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.

I think that plain old intellectualism [can be] a more powerful force than the idea of the femme fatale.

When men and women think, the first step to progress is taken.

Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.

We're not trying to take power away or rule anybody - we're just trying to get up from under the rulers.

Only those young people can be accepted as healthy who refuse to be reconciled with the old order and foolishly or wisely struggle against it - such is the will of nature...

I was not going to surrender to the status quo and corporate insistence that ordinary people have no power and influence.