45 Quotes by Pierre Bourdieu

Thus, for an adequate interpretation of the differences found between the classes or within the same class as regards their relation to the various legitimate arts, painting, music, theatre, literature etc., one would have to analyse fully the social uses, legitimate or illegitimate, to which each of the arts, genres, works or institutions considered lends itself. For example, nothing more clearly affirms one's 'class', nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.

Femininity is imposed for the most part through an unremitting discipline that concerns every part of the body and is continuously recalled through the constraints of clothing or hairstyle.

Pour les fils de paysans, d'ouvriers, d'employés ou de petits commerçants, l'acquisition de la culture scolaire est acculturation.

El cuestionamiento de las formas de pensamiento vigentes que efectúa la revolución simbólica y la originalidad absoluta de lo que engendra tiene como contra partida la soledad absoluta que implica la transgresión de los límites de lo pensable. Este pensamiento que así se ha convertido en su propia medida no puede esperar en efecto que mentes estructuradas según esas mismas categorías que cuestiona puedan pensar este impensable.

en substituant au fait la protestation contre le fait, ne s'efforce-t-on pas, le plus souvent avec succès, de se persuader qu'un groupe capable de protester contre son propre privilège n'est pas un groupe privilégié ?

fast-thinkers ... think in cliches, in the "received ideas" that Flaubert talks about--banal, conventional, common ideas that are received generally. By the time they reach you, these ideas have already been received by everybody else, so reception is never a problem.

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.