Pierre Bourdieu Quotes

• The point of my work is to show that culture and education arent simply hobbies or minor influences. They are hugely important in the affirmation of differences between groups and social classes and in the reproduction of those differences.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Class, Differences, Important

  121 Copy quote

• Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Taste

  Pierre Bourdieu (1984). “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste”, p.6, Harvard University Press

  85 Copy quote

• The difficulty, in sociology, is to manage to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Thinking, Way, Sociology

  Pierre Bourdieu, John B. Thompson (1991). “Language and Symbolic Power”, p.207, Harvard University Press

  74 Copy quote

• The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Sociology, Function, Sociological

  Pierre Bourdieu, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (1999). “On Television”, p.17, The New Press

  77 Copy quote

• Every established order tends to produce the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Order, Produce

  Pierre Bourdieu (1977). “Outline of a Theory of Practice”, p.115, Cambridge University Press

  68 Copy quote

• The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need for words, and ask no more than complicitous silence.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Successful, Silence, Needs

  Pierre Bourdieu (1977). “Equisse D'une Théorie de la Pratique”, p.188, Cambridge University Press

  103 Copy quote

• The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Mind, World, Metaphor

  Pierre Bourdieu (1977). “Equisse D'une Théorie de la Pratique”, p.91, Cambridge University Press

  44 Copy quote

• Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Collective Unconscious, Males, Domination

  "On male domination" by Pierre Bourdieu, mondediplo.com. October 1998.

  81 Copy quote

• You cannot cheat with the law of conservation of violence: all violence is paid for, and for example, the structural violence exerted by the financial markets, in the form of layoffs, loss of security, etc., is matched sooner or later in the form of suicides, crime and delinquency, drug addiction, alcoholism, a whole host of minor and major everyday acts of violence.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Suicide, Loss, Law

  71 Copy quote

• The point of my work is to show that culture and education aren't simply hobbies or minor influences.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Hobbies, Culture, Influence

  "The Intellectual Class Struggle". New York Times, January 6, 2001.

  36 Copy quote

• Symbolic violence is violence wielded with tacit complicity between its victims and its agents, insofar as both remain unconscious of submitting to or wielding it.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Agents, Violence, Victim

  Pierre Bourdieu, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (1999). “On Television”, p.17, The New Press

  49 Copy quote

• I often say that sociology is a martial art, a means of self-defense. Basically, you use it to defend yourself, without having the right to use it for unfair attacks.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Art, Mean, Self

  "La sociologie est un sport de combat". Documentary, May 2, 2001.

  52 Copy quote

• Television enjoys a de facto monopoly on what goes into the heads of a significant part of the population and what they think.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Thinking, Population, Television

  Pierre Bourdieu, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (1999). “On Television”, p.18, The New Press

  50 Copy quote

• Practice has a logic which is not that of the logician.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Practice, Logic

  Pierre Bourdieu (1990). “The Logic of Practice”, p.86, Stanford University Press

  28 Copy quote

• If the sociologist has a role, it is probably more to furnish weapons than to give lessons.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Giving, Roles, Lessons

  Pierre Bourdieu's speech at the conference of the AFEF in Limoges, October 30, 1977.

  34 Copy quote

• I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Art, Struggle, Understanding

  40 Copy quote

• Only in imaginary experience (in the folk tale, for example), which neutralizes the sense of social realities, does the social world take the form of a universe of possibles equally possible for any possible subject.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Reality, Example, Doe

  Pierre Bourdieu (1990). “The Logic of Practice”, p.64, Stanford University Press

  29 Copy quote

• Photography itself is most frequently nothing but the reproduction of the image that a group produces of its own integration.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Photography, Groups, Produce

  29 Copy quote

• Unless saved by exceptional talent, he necessarily pays the price of clarity.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Pay, Talent, Clarity

  "Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power".

  25 Copy quote

• Algeria is what allowed me to accept myself.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Algeria, Accepting

  Pierre Bourdieu (2014). “Picturing Algeria”, p.32, Columbia University Press

  27 Copy quote

• In stamping photography with the patent of realism, society does nothing but confirm itself in the tautological certainty that an image of reality that conforms to its own representation of objectivity is truly objective.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Photography, Reality, Objectivity

  28 Copy quote

You May Also Like:

Michel Foucault

Anthony Giddens

Emile Durkheim

Max Weber

Karl Marx

Jurgen Habermas

Zygmunt Bauman

Jacques Derrida