Quotes by Michel Foucault

Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

“We demand that sex speak the truth [...] and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves wich we think we possess in our immediate consciousness.”

“It is pointless to ask: Why then is sex so secret? What is this force that so long reduced it to silence and has only recently relaxed its hold somewhat, allowing us to question it perhaps, but always in the context of and through its repression? In reality, this question, so often repeated nowadays, is but the recent form of a considerable affirmation and a secular prescription: there is where the truth is; go see if you can uncover it. [...] It is reasonable therefore to ask first of all: What is this injunction? Why this great chase after the truth of sex, the truth in sex?”

“Modern man is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets, and his hidden truth; he is a man who tries to invest himself”

“Death as the destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty words, the hollow jingle of a jester’s cap and bells.”

“Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.”