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
The most breathtaking Pierre Bourdieu quotes that are easy to memorize and remember
The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need for words, and ask no more than complicitous silence.
Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it.
The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden.
The difficulty, in sociology, is to manage to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood.
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.
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 mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.
If the sociologist has a role, it is probably more to furnish weapons than to give lessons.
Practice has a logic which is not that of the logician.
Algeria is what allowed me to accept myself.
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.
Photography itself is most frequently nothing but the reproduction of the image that a group produces of its own integration.
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.
Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier
Unless saved by exceptional talent, he necessarily pays the price of clarity.
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.