Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning; in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth.Michel Foucault
Men have dreamed of liberating machines. But there are no machines of freedom, by definition.Michel Foucault
To say that madness is not a disease is to say that it is not simply a natural fact, or physical event, or the purely contingent effect in man of organic causes; and this means that madness has a human meaning, that it is a human fact and event, irreducible to any order of the organic or the physical.Michel Foucault
For madness, there is no witness. Of it, one is at once subject and object, without division; one is alone with madness and is altogether within it.Michel Foucault
What we call madness is a certain overt behaviour towards oneself, towards others, towards the world, and in relation to which our normal behaviour, from our waking moment to the depths of dreamless sleep, is a continuous periphrasis.Michel Foucault
The reason is in the distance which separates us from it; the measure of its truth lies in the eloquence of our recognition of ourselves, of the whole distance of ourselves: in it is our own truth.Michel Foucault
The concept of madness as unreason or the inverse of reason was born in the modern era.Michel Foucault
For a civilization that has decided to liquidate the mysterious forces of the unreason that lurks within it, madness is an untamed beast that whispers dark and incomprehensible paradoxes about the human condition.Michel Foucault
But socially, the madman or madwoman was situated at the level of the animality in man, not at the level of his physical nature.Michel Foucault
From this point of view, madness is the errant existence par excellence.Michel Foucault