Michel Foucault Quotes

The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.

Real politics are the possession and distribution of power.

Society receives its momentum from power.

Institutions are more powerful than men.

The people who exercise the power are not always the same people over whom it is exercised.

Power is the relation of a given person to other persons, in which the more this person expresses opinions, theories and justifications of the collective action the less is his participation in that action.

Directors assume I'm, like, establishment.

I think the greatest lesson that power has to teach us is, once you've had it, once you are a part of it, you're never free.

What are the relationships between power and knowledge? There are two bad, short answers: 1. Knowledge provides an instrument that those in power can wield for their own ends. 2. A new body of knowledge brings into being a new class of people or institutions that can exercise a new kind of power.

Ultimately, political order does not generate itself.

The whole conversation of my work has to do with power and who has it.

It is the nature of government and of technology to establish control.

I have the power to control the crowd's emotions.

You can never know what is and what is not powerful, but you can always find out what the powerful people are scared of. A state like China looks so powerful, but they are so scared of the Internet, so the Internet is more powerful than them.

My interest is in power. How power works.

Women were the ones that held the reins, it emerged.

Power naturally and necessarily follows property.

I have discovered that a famed familiarity in great ones is a note of certain usurpation on the less; for great and popular men feign themselves to be servants to others to make those slaves to them.

Some forms of truth are really forms of social power and oppression.

An expert is someone who articulates the needs of those in power.

The power to do things for people is also the power to do things to people.

In real life, what scares me is politicians, corporations and people that think they know what the world should be.

Work is pushing matter around. Politics is pushing people around.

Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or think they have) gained.

Ideology is a certain unique experience of the universe and your place in it, to put it in standard terms, which serves the production of the existing power relations and blah blah blah.