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.

The difficulty, in sociology, is to manage to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood.

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

In stamping photography with the patent of realism, society does nothing but confirm itself in the tautological certainty that an image of reality that conforms to its own representation of objectivity is truly objective.

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

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.

Every established order tends to produce the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.