Michel Foucault Quotes

It is hard for power to enjoy or incorporate humour and satire in its system of control.

Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.

Whenever anyone challenges anything, the powers that be try to paint them as extremists or radicals or whatever. And I think that's actually nonsense.

There are two fairly standard approaches to political power used by those who seek it. Some seek power with the assumption that the citizenry are the source of legitimacy and are to be treated with respect. Others concentrate on identifying whatever insecurities there are within the citizenry and on exploiting them.'

All political questions, all matters of right, are at bottom only questions of might.

As force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as the most free and the most popular.

Government is force.

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.

Those who fear men like laws.

Power resides where men believe power resides.

Many and subtle are the ideological weapons that the State has wielded through the centuries. Once excellent weapon has been tradition. The longer that the rule of a State has been able to preserve itself, the more powerful this weapon; for then, the X Dynasty or the Y State has the seeming weight of centuries of tradition behind it.

Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.

The powers that be understand that sexual freedom or liberation with any kind of joy means they are losing control.

An expert is someone who articulates the needs of those in power.

When authority is backed up by an immediate physical compulsion, what we are dealing with is not authority proper (i.e. symbolic authority), but simply an agency of brute force.

And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.

Hume's paradox does hold: power is in the hands of the governed. If they refuse to accept it, you're in trouble, no matter how many guns you have.

By punishing men of talent we confirm their authority.

Power is founded upon opinion.

When others are not doing what we would like them to or are threatening disobedience, we are most conscious of the need of controlling them and of the influences by which they are controlled.

People are submissive to power, and few of them can be influenced by doctrines of righteousness.

You!" he cried. "You never hated because you never lived. I know what you are all of you, from first to last--you are the people in power! You are the police--the great, fat smiling men in blue and buttons! You are the Law, and you have never been broken. But is there a free soul alive that does not long to break you, only because you have never been broken?

Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose. It is the dispositional cement that binds men to systems of authority.

Men submit from habit to everything that seeks power.

Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression.