Pierre Bourdieu Quotes

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.

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

Every established order tends to produce (to very different degrees with different means) the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.

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

By making social hierarchies and the reproduction of these hierarchies appear based upon the hierarchy of ‘gifts’, merits, or skill established and ratified by its sanctions, or, in a word, by converting social hierarchies into academic hierarchies, the educational system fulfils a function of legitimation which is more and more necessary to the perpetuation of the ‘social order’ as the evolution of the power relationship between classes tends more completely to exclude the imposition of a hierarchy based upon the crude and ruthless affirmation of the power relationship.

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

The practical mastery of the logic or of the imminent necessity of a game — a mastery acquired by experience of the game, and one which works outside conscious control and discourse (in the way that. for instance, techniques of the body do).

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

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

The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects which is itself but an endless circle of mutually reflecting metaphors.

You can fight the international technocracy in an efficient way only by challenging it on its very own field of activity, the economic science, and by opposing a kind of knowledge that respects human beings and realities towards that mutilated kind of knowledge used by the technocrats themselves.

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