Zygmunt Bauman Quotes
Power, in a nutshell, is the ability to get things done, and politics is the ability to decide which things need to be done.
Unlike 'real relationships', 'virtual relationships' are easy to enter and to exit. They look smart and clean, feel easy to use, when compared with the heavy, slow-moving, messy real stuff.
Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.
You are a stranger, I am a stranger, we all remain strangers, and nevertheless we can like or even love each other.
We belong to talking, not what talking is about... Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.
The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.
The planet is full and we will be rubbing shoulders forever. There is nowhere else to go.
A whole world is taken to the grave with the dead person; each one of us is unique and unrepeatable.
There are other ways of finding satisfaction, recipes for human happiness, enjoyment, dignified and meaningful, gratifying life, than increased consumption that increases production.
Like the phoenix, socialism is reborn from every pile of ashes left day in, day out, by burnt-out human dreams and charred hopes.
When people think, rightly or wrongly, that marriage is forever, they are stimulated to seek and find a resolution, a modus vivendi, whenever they quarrel.
This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.
Relationships, like cars, should undergo regular services to make sure they are still roadworthy.
The risk of the Holocaust is not that it will be forgotten, but that it will be embalmed and surrounded by monuments and used to absolve all future sins.
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.
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.
I think that the essential instruction of the Bible is very much topical. The sole problem is that with every change of historical setting, you need to readjust the interpretation of the message.
As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Today's youth have been cast in a condition of liminal drift, with no way of knowing whether it is transitory or permanent.
Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better.
What has been cut apart cannot be glued back together. Abandon all hope of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of fluid modernity.
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.
The consumerist culture insists that swearing eternal loyalty to anything and anybody is imprudent, since in this world new glittering opportunities crop up daily.
'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.
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.
Never paint epic canvases during the revolution, because the revolutionaries will tear them apart.
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.
For intellectual authority, the appropriate version of Descartes 's cogito would be today: I am talked about, therefore I am.
While a few poor countries are catching up with the rich world, the differences between the richest and poorest individuals around the globe are huge and likely growing.
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.
The art of walking on quicksand is still beyond me. What I learned is only how difficult this art is to master and how hard people need to struggle to learn it.
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.
The so called "progress," "time marching on," is not a straight line, but a pendulum.
Jews and Gypsies were well-nigh the only Diasporas in 19th century Europe. Now go to London, it is a collection of Diasporas.
Being condemned by fate to perpetual togetherness, we better make that shared fate into our shared, consciously and gladly embraced, destiny.
Where we hope to land (and where we do land, though only for a fleeting moment, enough for tired wings to catch the wind anew) is a 'there' which we thought of little and knew of even less.
People do not choose a government that will bring the market within their control; instead, the market in every way conditions governments to bring the people within its control.
