Michel Foucault Secret Quotations

What is peculiar to modern societies is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.

Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.

In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, man's dispute with madness was dramatic debate in which he confronted the secret powers of the world; the experience of madness was clouded by images of the Fall and the Will of God, of the Beast and the Metamorphosis, and of all the marvelous secrets of Knowledge

Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning; in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth.

It is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its dominion; death is power's limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most private.

Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.