Michel Foucault Quotes

Silence is one of the hardest kind of arguments to refute. There is no good substitute for wisdom; but silence is the best that has yet been discovered.

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.

Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.

Foucault's genius is to go down to the little dramas, dress them in facts hardly anyone else has noticed, and turn these stage settings into clues to a hitherto un-thought series of confrontations out of which, he contends, the orderly structure of society is composed.

Silence is most powerful. Speech is always less powerful than silence.

Nothing is sometimes the right thing to say.

There is no diplomacy like silence.

There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying things.

Whatever you say, say nothing.

Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.

Good as is discourse, silence is better and shames it.

There are many justifications of silence; there can be none of insincerity.

Good as is discourse, silence is better, and shames it. The length of the discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be suffered.

That silence is one of the great arts of conversation is allowed by Cicero himself, who says, there is not only an art, but even an eloquence in it

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.

The unspoken word is capital. We can invest it or we can squander it.

But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

Where there is power, there is resistance.

It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time

Never pause unless you have a reason for it, but when you pause, pause as long as you can.

I feel there is something nice about not talking. Like you can say more by actually saying less.

When mouths close, it’s because there’s something important to be said.

I think communication starts when words are not present at all ... I think we put so much emphasis on language, actually silence is so much more important.

You can't improve on saying nothing.