45 Quotes by 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.

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

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

I think if I hadn't become a sociologist, I would have become very anti-intellectual.

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

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.

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.

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.