Pierre Bourdieu Quotations

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I think if I hadn't become a sociologist, I would have become very anti-intellectual.

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

The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.

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.

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.

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

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.

Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier

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

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

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.

Algeria is what allowed me to accept myself.

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

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.

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.

Unless saved by exceptional talent, he necessarily pays a price for clarity.