Pierre Bourdieu Quotes

Americans sometimes say to me that they have no class system themselves. All human beings have class systems. It can be based on a different thing in a different country, but the thing about breeding is, you can't buy it. You can't buy class.

Everyone has class, one class or another.

I've always enjoyed studying the small clues that indicate a particular class level.

I'm not posh or common, I'm in between.

The middle class is so funny, it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny.

Class is real. It can't be faked.

In modern civilized communities... the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum.

I learned early that class is universally admired.

In the West, it's just a given that art exists in this high-class place. But in Japan, there's no high class. The minute you come out, you're low class.

Character and class are character and class. Either you have it or you don't.

Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses?

Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege.

Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.

An earthly kingdom cannot exist without inequality of persons. Some must be free, some serfs, some rulers, some subjects.

As the classes in modern life come together, we have become much more intensely class conscious. It's a very curious thing. But I deal with human beings with whom I've come in contact and have had a chance to closely observe. Their upper-classness is not a matter of particular fascination for me.

Taste depends upon those finer emotions which make the organization of the soul.

The diminution of the reality of class, however socially desirable in many respects, seems to have the practical effect of diminishing our ability to see people in their difference and specialness.

Taste may be compared to that exquisite sense of the bee, which instantly discovers and extracts the quintessence of every flower, and disregards all the rest of it.

Wealth, howsoever got, in England makes lords of mechanics, gentlemen of rakes; Antiquity and birth are needless here; 'Tis impudence and money makes a peer.

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.

Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.

Our culture will become like it was during the medieval times when there truly was a cultural elite. The rest of the people will just watch television, which will be their only frame of reference.

These families, you know, are our upper crust, not upper ten thousand.

It's very difficult, historically, to define what an elite is. But whatever it is, people are very angry at that idea, I think, not so much because of wealth or privilege as much as attitude that the populous masses, if I could use that overused term, feel that a particular government or cultural group is not subject to the ramifications of their own ideology.