"The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the outlaw, the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order."
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Quote collection
Michel Foucault quotes (page 5 of 10)
188 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I'm very proud that some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist."
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"Visibility is a trap."
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"Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments."
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"The practice of S/M is the creation of pleasure.... And that's why S/M is really a subculture. It's a process of invention. S/M isthe use of a strategic relationship as a source of pleasure."
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"In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of pirates."
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"Penal law was not created by the common people, nor by the peasantry, nor by the proletariat, but entirely by the bourgeoisie as an important tactical weapon in this system of divisions which they wished to introduce."
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"Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital."
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"It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticise and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them."
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"To work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before"
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"The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines."
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"The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes."
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"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."
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"It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty."
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"Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which the Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic."
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"Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse."
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"Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism."
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"I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am."
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"Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable."
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"The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play)."
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