Pierre Bourdieu quotes

Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and public intellectual, renowned for his influential theories on social power and cultural capital. His work significantly shaped contemporary sociology, especially regarding the relationships between education, society, and inequality. He developed key concepts like habitus and field, making lasting contributions to social theory. Here are 16 of his quotes:

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

Pierre Bourdieu

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

Pierre Bourdieu

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

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

Pierre Bourdieu

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

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

Pierre Bourdieu

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

Pierre Bourdieu

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

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

Pierre Bourdieu

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).

Pierre Bourdieu

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.

Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, observed that elites in a society typically maintain their power not simply by controlling the means of production (ie money), but by dominating the cultural discourse too (ie a society's intellectual map). And what is most important in relation to that cognitive map is not what is overtly stated and discussed – but what is left unstated, or ignored.

Pierre Bourdieu

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

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.

Pierre Bourdieu