Quote collection
188 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from a lazar house, he becomes infuriated."
"Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret."
"[Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice."
"The first task of the doctor is ... political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government." Man will be totally and definitively cured only if he is first liberated."
"My role - and that is too emphatic a word - is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed."
"Truth is not by nature free - nor error servile - but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power."
"Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance."
"Let us ask... how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors, etc... we should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc. We should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects."
"The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library."
"A critique does not consist in saying that things aren't good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based... To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy."
"Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history"
"At every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, what one is."
"There are moments in life where the question of knowing whether one might think otherwise than one thinks and perceive otherwise than one sees is indispensable if one is to continue to observe or reflect... What is philosophy today... if it does not consist in, instead of legitimizing what we already know, undertaking to know how and how far it might be possible to think otherwise?"
"I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls."
"The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence."
"Since the Fall, man had accepted labor as a penance and for its power to work redemption. It was not a law of nature which forced man to work, but the effect of a curse."
"What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?"
"Sexual behavior is not, as is too often assumed, a superimposition of, on the one hand, desires which derive from natural instincts, and, on the other hand, of permissive or restrictive laws which tell us what we should or shouldn't do. Sexual behavior is more than that."
"'The prison' begins well before its doors. It begins as soon as you leave your house - and even before."
"Politics is not what it pretends to be, the expression of a collective will. Politics breathes well only where this will is multiple, hesitant, confused, and obscure even to itself."