Top 313 Bourgeois Quotes & Sayings

Chairs are architecture, sofas are bourgeois.

Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i.e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America.

I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me...I don't know which makes me feel worse.

I live a bourgeois life.

That is the real pivot of all bourgeois consciousness in all countries: fear and hate of the instinctive, intuitional, procreativebody in man or woman. But of course this fear and hate had to take on a righteous appearance, so it became moral, said that the instincts, intuitions and all the activities of the procreative body were evil, and promised a reward for their suppression. That is the great clue to bourgeois psychology: the reward business.

Il faut e pater le bourgeois. One must astound the bourgeois.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

Revolution in Love’. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as against bourgeois promiscuity?

One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success.

In other words, New York has gone all suburban and bourgeois on us.

How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species

More than one branch of the avant-garde, claiming to break with the bourgeois vision and mode of production, remains tied to it in spite of its denials and ex-communications. We are far from having overcome bourgeois thought or practices, despite the socialist "intermission" between the Russian revolution and the collapse of the Berlin wall. The avant-garde has lost its radical nature. On the other hand, "bourgeois theatre" is sometimes subtle enough to flirt with the avant-garde or to make "intelligent boulevard theatre.

If you want a bourgeois existence, you shouldn't be an actor. You're in the wrong profession.

I get along with everyone except for men my age, who are bourgeois or retired or boring.

Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.

People think that the art market is about opportunists and hedge-fund managers getting broken art, but what really happened is that there was a new configuration of bourgeois values in the U.S. and an acceptance among the bourgeoisie of contemporary art as an idea. I think that bourgeois people are horrible.

Hypocrisy is the characteristic feature of the dying bourgeois epoch.

In the '60s, I thought golf was bourgeois, so I didn't play at all for 20 years.

I am starting a collection of only right-hand gloves. It’s ever so bourgeois to have two.

To fear the bourgeois is bourgeois.

Free speech is a bourgeois prejudice.

In high school, it was very fashionable to be disdainful of the bourgeois suburbs, but I secretly liked them.

Bourgeois society is not fundamentally opposed to the bourgeois women's movement, which is proven by the fact that in various states reforms of private and public laws concerning women have been initiated.

Bourgeois values aren't just for white people. The irony is: Bourgeois values can help minorities get ahead.

Marx and Engels never talked about murdering the bourgeois. According to the old bourgeois concept, the judges were the ones who judged, and the executioners were the ones who executed.

Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. The bourgeois and proletariat classes have become abstractions: the petite-bourgeoisie, in contrast, is everywhere, you can see it everywhere, even in the areas of the bourgeois and the proletariat, what's left of them.

I'm not a bourgeois person, never will be.

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .

But when reason and the study of history began revealing the irrationality, the limitations, and the merely transitory nature of the capitalist order, bourgeois ideology as a whole and with it bourgeois economics began abandoning both reason and history.

I didn't want to spent a lot of close time with someone who believed that fun is a bourgeois indulgence.

Continental thinkers have been obsessed with bourgeois man as representing the worst and most contemptible failure of modernity, which must at all costs be overcome. Nihilism in its most palpable sense means that the bourgeois has won, that the future, all foreseeable futures, belong to him, that all heights above him and all depths beneath him are illusory and that life is not worth living on these terms.

Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not serve to guarantee much more than what could be called the bourgeois conception of freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a "free" man is essentially an element of a social machine and has only a certain set of prescribed and delimited freedoms; freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of the social machine more than those of the individual.

During the eighties and nineties, people wanted to be chic, elegant, bourgeois.

Privacy is a bourgeois fantasy.

The Marxist critique is only a critique of capital, a critique coming from the heart of the middle and petit bourgeois classes, for which Marxism has served for a century as a latent ideology.... The Marxist seeks a good use of economy. Marxism is therefore only a limited petit bourgeois critique, one more step in the banalization of life toward the "good use" of the social!

The bourgeois takes economic power very seriously, and often worships it quite unselfishly.

Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind.

Le Pen is a petit bourgeois nationalist.

For in the theoretical field bourgeois economics no longer engages in blithe and joyous fights.

There is no such thing as pure art. It's a bourgeois conceit.

For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.

Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.

[Rock and the intellectual Left] must both be interpreted as parts of the cultural fabric of late capitalism. Their success comes from the bourgeois' need to feel that he is not bourgeois.

Axiome: la haine du bourgeois est le commencement de la vertu. Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.

The bourgeois are other people.

I'm every bourgeois nightmare - a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.

I'm a regular guy; I like well-defined outlines. I'm old-fashioned, bourgeois.

To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

You've done the bourgeois thing, perhaps, but let's not call that love.

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept

Friedrich Engels once said: "Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism." What does "regression into barbarism" mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization.

Workers in the bourgeois countries must fight for equal rights for men and women.

Often, alas, the most detestable kind of bourgeois is the anti-bourgeois kind of bourgeois.

I stopped drinking and realised New York still has a lot of charm, but it has become so bourgeois and affluent - and I can't really complain because I'm sort of bourgeois and affluent myself, but I like living in a place where artists and musicians and writers can actually pay the rent.

Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?

Americans ... do not naturally apply the term "bourgeois" to themselves, or to anyone else for that matter. They do like to call themselves middle class, but that does not carry with it any determinate spiritual content. ... The term "middle class" does not have any of the many opposites that bourgeois has, such as aristocrat, saint, hero, or artist - all good.

The function of a bourgeois democracy is to secure the consent of the masses to their own exploitation and oppression.