Michel Foucault Quotes

History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.

It becomes him that writes an History, sometimes to extol enemies in his praises, when their praise worthy actions bespeak it, and at the same time to reprove the best friends, when their deeds appear worthy of a reproof; in-as-much as History is good for nothing, if truth (which is the very eye of the animal) be not in it.

What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end; legends are lies which become history in the end.

History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.

I like to point out that people very often confuse the idea that truth is subjective with the fact that truth is perishable.

We're not talking about truth, we're talking about something that seems like truth - the truth we want to exist.

The motive force of history is truth and not lies.

It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.

Maybe the social value of truth is as a destination - so long as we do not assume we have arrived there.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion.

A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.

Truth is simply whatever you can bring yourself to believe.

What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end.

It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.

Of all studies, the most delightful and the most useful is biography. The seeds of great events lie near the surface; historians delve too deep for them. No history was ever true. Lives I have read which, if they were not, had the appearance, the interest, and the utility of truth.

We mythologists know very well that myths and legends contain borrowings, moral lessons, nature cycles, and a hundred other distorting influences, and we labor to cut them away and get to what might be a kernel of truth. In fact, these same techniques must be applied to the most sober histories, for no one writes the clear and apparent truth-if such a thing can even be said to exist.

Progress is slow partly from mere intellectual inertia. In a subject where there is no agreed procedure for knocking out errors, doctrines have a long life. A professor teaches what he was taught, and his pupils, with a proper respect and reverence for teachers, set up a resistance against his critics for no other reason than that it was he whose pupils they were.

To write history is as important as to make history. It is an unchanging truth that if the writer does not remain true to the maker, then it takes on a quality that will confuse humanity.

Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard.

The only justifications for belief have the form "justified for me".

History is not history unless it is the truth.

Theology is but a science of applied to God. As schools change theology must necessarily change. Truth is everlasting, but our ideas of truth are not. Theology is but our ideas of truth classified and arranged.

It is a general rule that when the grain of truth cannot be found, men will swallow great helpings of falsehood.

Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian.