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 point of my work is to show that culture and education aren't simply hobbies or minor influences. (Pierre Bourdieu)
The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need of words, and ask no more than complicitous silence. View quote
Pierre Bourdieu
Practice has a logic which is not that of the logician. View quote
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. View quote
Pierre Bourdieu
Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it. View quote
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. View quote
Pierre Bourdieu
If the sociologist has a role, it is probably more to furnish weapons than to give lessons. View quote
Pierre Bourdieu
The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden. View quote
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. View quote
Pierre Bourdieu
The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects which is itself but an endless circle of mutually reflecting metaphors. View quote
Pierre Bourdieu
Every established order tends to produce (to very different degrees with different means) the naturalization of its own arbitrariness. (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). View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Pierre Bourdieu