Michel Foucault Quotes

“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”

“This book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge.”

“We have then a public execution and a timetable. They do not punish the same type of crimes or the same type of delinquent. But they each define a certain penal style.”

“The Panopticon is a marvelous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power.”

“We are now far away from the country of tortures, dotted with wheels, gibbets, gallows, pillories; we are far, too, from that dream of the reformers, less than fifty years before.”

“The age of sobriety in punishment had begun.”

“The public execution is to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual.”

“In this scene of terror, the role of the people was an ambiguous one.”

“The need for punishment without torture was ... formulated as a cry from the heart or ... from an outraged nature.”

“A penal system must be conceived as a mechanism ... to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate them.”

“Set the force that drove the criminal to the crime against itself.”

“Public punishment is the ceremony of immediate recoding.”

“Delinquency (is) a politically or economically less dangerous—and ... usable—form of illegality.”

“It would not be true to say that the prison was born with the new codes.”

“Visibility is a trap.”

“Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals as objects.”

“Discipline is a political anatomy of detail.”

“The soul is the prison of the body.”

“The ‘Enlightenment’, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.”

“Surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action.”