Foucault, Michel

"Madness is to be absolutely alone with one's truth."

"Power is everywhere because it comes from everywhere."

"I am no one. I don't exist. There exist, however, problems that require solutions."

"The human being is not a sovereign subject anterior to power relations; man is constituted through power relations."

"One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to prevent one's friends from being sacrificed; but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission."

"Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting."

"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 such things."

"Silence itself is a form of discourse."

"Do not assume that I want to make people happy; I want to make them aware."

"Real freedom consists in being able to go to the limit of one's thoughts."

"We are not necessarily looking for a global answer or a solution to a universal problem, but rather to create a space where many different questions could be raised."

"History is filled with the sound of silences breaking."

"The essential thing is not to be cured but to become lucid."

"To know oneself, one should assert oneself."

"The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning."

"My role is to show people that they are freer than they feel."

"It is through discourse that we come to know the depths of the soul."

"The task of criticism is to decipher and to depict fundamental structures."

"What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, not to individuals."

"A civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does is a civilization that is afraid."

"Truth is not outside power, or lacking in power; contrary to a common conception, truth is a thing of this world."

"There is no culture without violence or repression."

"We must still look upon ourselves and what we've been told about ourselves with extreme skepticism."

"Every society has individuals who will always resist the limits placed upon them."

"The question is not changing people's consciousness but their activities, their practices."

"Sexuality is neither a natural fact nor a pure construction of knowledge."

"Discourse creates the possibility of knowledge."

"One makes war to exist, not the reverse."

"The human being is constituted historically, not naturally."

"Authority is not something to reject out of hand but to analyze."