Michel Foucault Quotes

Who among us is so certain of our identity? Who hasn't been asked, 'What's your background?' and hesitated, even for a split second, to answer their inquisitor. Howard Jacobson's 'The Finkler Question' forces us to ask that of ourselves, and that's why it's a must read, no matter what your background.

As a European I had fit in almost seamlessly in New York for the last 25 years, but in Oklahoma I stood out like a sore thumb.

I have a European frame of mind and Europe is my home.

I'm a proud Londoner, a Brit, European, of Pakistani heritage, a Muslim - we all have multiple layers of identity - that's what makes us who we are.

People should ask themselves why is it that they want to act.

Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.

I am Welsh by birth, English by education, and European by nature.

I meet people and a lot of times, instead of saying, "Are you from the East Coast?" people just go, "you're from the East Coast, right?", having no reason to have known that. I don't know what that is. Maybe it's just that I'm Jewish.

How can we encourage other human beings to extend their moral sympathies beyond a narrow locus? How can we learn to become mere human beings, shorn of any more compelling national, ethnic, or religious identity? We can be reasonable. It is in the very nature of reason to fuse cognitive and moral horizons. Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.

This idea is more surely understood by interrogation; WHAT DO I KNOW? which I bear as my motto with the emblem of a pair of scales.

Then we shall... be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we would know the mind of God.

I'm not who you think i am. If you love me, you love me for the wrong reasons.

Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.

Even beyond sexuality, I'm generally interested in identity.

The only reason I became a writer was so I could exist on a piece of paper.

Our enemy is fear. Blinding, reason-killing fear. Fear consumes the truth and poisons all the evidence, leading us to false assumptions and irrational conclusions.

human beings seem to hold on more tenaciously to a cultural identity that is learned through suffering than to one that has been acquired through pleasure and delight.

Being Nigerian is a strong part of my identity. Being American is a strong part of my identity. And there are important parts of who I am that really have nothing to do with my national connection.

I always felt the Jewish part more. In fact, growing up I felt like a Jew among WASPs. My brother is more decidedly Waspy.

There's nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.

Reason died in 1914, November 1914 ... after that everybody began to rave.

No. But then the American Government--whatever branch--has never really grasped the concept of tribal identity.

Arthur felt happy. He was terribly pleased that the day was for once working out so much according to plan. Only twenty minutes ago he had decided he would go mad, and now here he was already chasing a Chesterfield sofa across the fields of prehistoric Earth.

You cannot escape where you come from, September. Some part of it remains inside you always, like the slender white heart in the center of the thickest onion.

I think history is inextricably linked to identity. If you don't know your history, if you don't know your family, who are you?