Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste and his related work:

• “Nothing more clearly affirms one's 'class', nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.”

• “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.”

• “Those who suppose they are producing a materialist theory of knowledge when they make knowledge a passive recording and abandon the ‘active aspect’ of knowledge to idealism, as Marx complains in the theses on Feuerbach, forget that all knowledge, and in particular all knowledge of the social world, is an act of construction implementing schemes of thought and expression, and that between conditions of existence and practices or representations there intervenes the structuring activity of the agents, who, far from reacting mechanically to mechanical stimulations, respond to the invitations or threats of a world whose meaning they have helped to produce.”

• “The point of my work is to show that culture and education aren't 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.”

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