Unless saved by exceptional talent, he necessarily pays the price of clarity.

The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need for words, and ask no more than complicitous silence.

Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier

Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it.

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

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

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

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.

Television enjoys a de facto monopoly on what goes into the heads of a significant part of the population and what they think.

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 mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.

Artists are those who can evade the verbose.

To transform this world into a better place to live, make yourself a better person first.

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end.

I have lived too completely. I think I have known every human emotion.

Every medium - oral, written, print, and now electronic - has its own associated thought patterns and mind sets.

Oh, what a glory doth this world put on, for him who with a fervent heart goes forth under the bright and glorious sky, and looks on duties well performed, and days well spent.

I wish more people would belabor the obvious, and more often.

I never aspired to be Speaker simply so I could say, 'I am the Speaker of the House of Commons,' and tell my children that.

I couldn't do an acting job just to be working. It really had to have some soul to it.