{"author":"Michel Foucault","author_id":"Michel+Foucault","total_quotes":63,"quotes":[{"text":"Curiosity evokes ‘concern’; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential. I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can employ themselves at this task exist. Why do we suffer? From too little: from the channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufficient. There is no point in adopting a protectionist attitude, to prevent ‘bad’ information from invading and suffocating the ‘good.’ Rather, we must multiply the paths and the possibility of comings and goings.","author":"Michel Foucault","tags":["curiosity","foucault"],"id":5039,"author_id":"Michel+Foucault"},{"text":"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.","author":"Michel Foucault","tags":["books","fantastic","fantasy","imagination","reading"],"id":10926,"author_id":"Michel+Foucault"},{"text":"Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, “sacralized” and “sacralizing” figures) to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive. In our culture (and doubtless in many others), discourse was not originally a product, a thing, a kind of goods; it was essentially an act _ an act placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane, the licit and the illicit, the religious and the blasphemous. Historically, it was a gesture fraught with risks before becoming goods caught up in a circuit of ownership.","author":"Michel Foucault","tags":["philosopy"],"id":26697,"author_id":"Michel+Foucault"},{"text":"We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms, it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’... In fact power produces, it produces reality, it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.","author":"Michel Foucault","tags":["knowledge","power","production","truth"],"id":30627,"author_id":"Michel+Foucault"},{"text":"Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?","author":"Michel Foucault","tags":["ity","barracks","discipline","hospitals","prison","prisons","school","schools","surveillance"],"id":34273,"author_id":"Michel+Foucault"},{"text":"The strategic adversary is fascism... The fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.","author":"Michel Foucault","tags":["fascism","love","power"],"id":38446,"author_id":"Michel+Foucault"},{"text":"The necessity of reform mustn’t be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tell one: “Don’t criticize, since you’re not capable of carrying out a reform.” That’s ministerial cabinet talk. Critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction that concludes, “this, then, is what needs to be done.” It should be an instrument for those for who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn’t have to lay down the law for the law. It isn’t a stage in a programming. It is a challenge directed to what is.","author":"Michel Foucault","tags":["activism","criticism","philosophy"],"id":48028,"author_id":"Michel+Foucault"},{"text":"We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it isgood-and that is the real theater-totranscend them in the manner of play, bymeans of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair,to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put 'inplay,' show up, transform and reversethe systems which quietly order us about.","author":"Michel Foucault","tags":["irony","play","rituals","transformation"],"id":70165,"author_id":"Michel+Foucault"},{"text":"I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.","author":"Michel Foucault","tags":["literature","madness","philosophy","reason","sanity"],"id":84176,"author_id":"Michel+Foucault"},{"text":"There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than 'politicians' think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.","author":"Michel Foucault","tags":["crowd-sourcing","elitism","intellectualism","politics","populism"],"id":91849,"author_id":"Michel+Foucault"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":63,"pages":7,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}