Best 150 quotes of Zygmunt Bauman on MyQuotes

Zygmunt Bauman

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    After many years of thinking, reading and writing and looking, I came to believe that there are two basic, essential values which are indispensable for humane, decent, dignified life: one is freedom, and the other is security.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    Alas, you don't need monsters for monstrous deeds to be accomplished.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    All the skills which I have acquired during my sociological life allow me to diagnose and explain what is going on, but not to predict what will happen.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    An ideal and flawless freedom, "complete freedom", enabling without disabling, is I believe an oxymoron in metaphysics as much as it is an unreachable goal in social life.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    A reliable assurance of the right and ability to dismantle the constructed structure must be offered, before the job of construction starts in earnest.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    As long as being a stranger and surrounded by strangers was seen as a temporary irritant, a smallest departure from the binding rules of conduct by a member of a minority, was taken for a major crime justifying deportation.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    As long as we say: "Alright, it is truth for me, and I believe in it and I am ready to fight for it, but I accept that others have different beliefs - and so let me have a closer look at what they believe" - we can gain from our intercourse thanks to our difference, not despite our difference.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    As the run-by-capital society of producers turned since into the run-by-capital society of consumers, I would say that the main, indeed "meta", function of the governments has become now to assure that it is the meetings between commodities and the consumers, and credit issuers and the borrowers, that regularly take place.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    As to describing me as an outsider throughout, and an outsider through and through - I have no reason to disagree.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    Attempts to tame the wayward and domesticate the riotous, to make the unknowable predictable and enchain the free-roaming - all such things sound the death knell to love. Eros won't outlast duality. As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    At the turn of the twenty-first century, the richest 5 percent of people receive one-third of total global income, as much as the poorest 80 percent.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    A whole world is taken to the grave with the dead person; each one of us is unique and unrepeatable.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    Avoid the crowd, avoid mass audiences, keep your own counsel, which is the counsel of philosophy of wisdom you can acquire and make your own.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    Being condemned by fate to perpetual togetherness, we better make that shared fate into our shared, consciously and gladly embraced, destiny.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    Capitalism proceeds through creative destruction. What is created is capitalism in a 'new and improved' form - and what is destroyed is self-sustaining capacity, livelihood and dignity of its innumerable and multiplied 'host organisms' into which all of us are drawn/seduced one way or another.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    Civilisation, the orderly world in which we live, is frail. We are skating on thin ice. There is a fear of a collective disaster. Terrorism, genocide, flu, tsunamis.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    "Community" came to be seen as a chat-group: you switch on as long as your pleasure lasts, then push another button and switch off. Very easy to go in and out, join and leave.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    Community is like a big family.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    Everybody is in trouble, including the up-and-coming economic miracles of China, Brazil or India.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    Every interpretation is but an introduction to another interpretation, and that is how Talmud pages are printed.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    For intellectual authority, the appropriate version of Descartes 's cogito would be today: I am talked about, therefore I am.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    For one to be free there must be at least two. Freedom signifies a social relation, an asymmetry of social conditions: essentially it implies social difference--it presumes and implies the presence of social division. Some can be free only in so far as there is a form of dependence they can aspire to escape.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    For one to be free there must be at least two.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    For the first time in living memory, the whole class of graduates faces a future of crushing debt, and a high probability, almost the certainty, of ad hoc, temporary, insecure and part-time work and unpaid 'trainee' pseudo-jobs deceitfully rebranded as 'practices' - all considerably below the skills they have acquired and eons below the level of their expectations.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    Freedom is the slogan of the strong, who feel self confident, self sufficient to do it alone.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    Freedom is the slogan which speaks to the ears of people who feel strong enough to manage on their own using their own resources, who can do without dependency because they can do without others caring for them.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    Freedom without security portends chaos, perpetual anxiety and fear. Security without freedom means slavery. So, each on its own is awful; only together they make for a good life. But, a big "but": being both necessary, complementing each other, they are nevertheless virtually incompatible.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    Freedom without security portends chaos, perpetual anxiety and fear.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    Fully "biodegradable" structures are nowadays the ideal and the standards to which most, if not all structures, struggle to measure up.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    'I am insecure' means: I can't cope on my own. The odds are overwhelming. I can't resist them on my own. I need us to join forces, stand shoulder to shoulder, march hand in hand.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    Ideally, nothing should be embraced by a consumer firmly, nothing should command a commitment till death do us part, no needs should be seen as fully satisfied, no desires considered ultimate. There ought to be a proviso 'until further notice' attached to any oath of loyalty and any commitment. It is but the volatility, the in-built temporality of all engagements that truly counts; it counts more than the commitment itself, which is anyway not allowed to outlast the time necessary for consuming the object of desire (or, rather, the time sufficient for the desirability of that object to wane).

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    I did not and do not think of the solidity-liquidity conundrum as a dichotomy; I view those two conditions as a couple locked, inseparably, in a dialectical bond.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    If Christ would have left Christian ethics codified on the table, then he wouldn't produce moral beings choosing between good and evil, but conformists fulfilling orders. I think the same can be said about the Bible.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    If only evil things are done by evil people... Life would be then safe, morally elevated, cozy - we know how to spot evil people and what to do with them to pay for their crimes.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    If there is something to permit the distinction between "solid" and "liquid" phases of modernity (that is, arranging them in an order of succession), it is the change in both the manifest and latent purpose behind the effort.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    If you look back on the history of the 20th century, the 19th century or even to the ancien régime of the 18th, you will see that first people rebelled against the order of the things because of lack of liberty, and demanded more freedom. And when they got more freedom, they got frightened, and they desired more security for a change. After a while, they started complaining, although more secure, they also become more dependent and rule-bound.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    I guess I am doomed to remain an outsider to the end, lacking as I am the indispensable qualities of an academic insider: school loyalty, conformity to the procedure, and readiness to obey by the school-endorsed criteria of cohesion and consistency.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    I guess my claustrophobia is incurable - feeling, as I tend to, ill at ease in any closed room, and always tempted to find out what is on the other side of the door.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    In a consumer society, people wallow in things, fascinating, enjoyable things. If you define your value by the things you acquire and surround yourself with, being excluded is humiliating.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change - as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    In a nutshell: if freedom visualised by the Enlightenment and demanded/promised by Marx was made to the measure of the ideal producer; the market-promoted freedom is designed with the ideal consumer in mind; neither of the two is "more genuine" than the other.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    In a world of global dependencies with no corresponding global polity and few tools of global justice, the rich of the world are free to pursue their own interests while paying no attention to the rest.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    In Celan's words a Jew is "a man with a little book under the shoulder." We are the keepers of tradition.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    Indeed, I did not truly "belong" to any school, order, intellectual camaraderie or clique; I did not apply for admission to any of them, let alone did much to deserve an invitation; nor would I be listed by any of them - at least listed unqualifiedly - as "one of us".

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    Ingeniously, capitalism discovered that the economy may be moved not by satisfying existing needs, but by creating new ones.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    In Montreal, where I taught in 1970, I met many people. The only ones who said to me they were Canadians, were Jews. All the rest were Scotts, Irish, English, French, Swedes.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    In our world of rampant individualisation, relationships are mixed blessings. They vacillate between a sweet dream and a nightmare, and there is no telling when one turns into the other.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    In "solid modernity" difference was tolerated as a temporary irritant only, expected to disappear tomorrow, when "those aliens" will become like us. "Living with strangers" was therefore not something to last and did not call for developing appropriate arts and skills. Now, however, it looks like that diasporic context of our living will not go away - it will be there forever, so learning how to live with strangers day in, day out without abandoning my own strangeness is high on the agenda.

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    Zygmunt Bauman

    In the last thirty years we have gained enormous amount of freedom (everywhere, except perhaps in places like Burma or North Korea), but we lost quite a large amount of security. Because of all sorts of reasons, because of globalization which stripped the nation state of a large part of its sovereignty away, because of the dismantling of the so-called welfare state. As a result, people feel simultaneously much freer and much more insecure.