Top 60 Zygmunt Bauman Quotes

#1. Power, in a nutshell, is the ability to get things done, and politics is the ability to decide which things need to be done.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #16512
#2. We already have - thanks to technology, development, skills, the efficiency of our work - enough resources to satisfy all human needs. But we don't have enough resources, and we are unlikely ever to have, to satisfy human greed.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #95447
#3. 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.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #122296
#4. Relationships, like cars, should undergo regular services to make sure they are still roadworthy.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #160673
#5. Justice' primes the human habitat for peaceful and friendly togetherness. It sets the table - the round table - for polylogue and negotiations guided by the will of agreement. Justice is the most 'socializing' of values.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #167563
#6. Happiness needs one-upmanship.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #227782
#7. 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.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #233047
#8. The carrying power of a bridge is not the average strength of the pillars, but the strength of the weakest pillar. I have always believed that you do not measure the health of a society by GNP but by the condition of its worst off.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #245122
#9. Human attention tends to be focused on the satisfactions relationships are hoped to bring, precisely because somehow they have not been truly satisfactory. And if they do satisfy, the price of this satisfaction has often been found to be unacceptable.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #249657
#10. Occupying the bottom end of the inequality ladder, and becoming a 'collateral victim' of a human action or a natural disaster, interact the way the opposite poles of magnets do: they tend to gravitate towards each other.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #308021
#11. You judge a society by the decency of living of the weakest

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #370852
#12. This was replaced by a widespread and aggressive individualism whereby everyone looks out for himself, at the expense of others and without worrying about the good of society.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #396796
#13. 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.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #439718
#14. 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.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #509162
#15. Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #516739
#16. Circular reasoning is infallible even if not exactly logical, and
this is why so many of us so often resort to it - not so much to
resolve baffling problems, but to be absolved of the obligation
to worry about them.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #536608
#17. I was leftwing, I am leftwing, and I will die leftwing.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #573353
#18. We belong to talking, not what talking is about ... Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #615326
#19. To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #635592
#20. The main point about civility is ... the ability to interact with strangers without holding
their strangeness against them and without pressing them to surrender it or to renounce
some or all the traits that have made them strangers in the first place.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #679930
#21. All certainty
that comes after the 'original sin' of dismantling the matter-of-fact
world full of routine and short of reflection must be a manufactured
certainty, a blatantly and unashamedly 'made-up' certainty,
burdened with all the inborn vulnerability of human-made decisions.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #723390
#22. The notion that we know all there is to know about people and their needs and that all these data are pinned down exactly and fully explained by the market, the state, sociological surveys, ratings, and everything else that turns people into the Global Anonymous.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #734942
#23. 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.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #735915
#24. 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.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #745330
#25. 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.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #806236
#26. 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.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #813946
#27. No longer can democracy and freedom be fully and truly secure in one country, or even in a group of countries; their defence in a world saturated with injustice and inhabited by billions of humans denied human dignity will inevitably corrupt the very values they are meant to defend.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #842529
#28. For one to be free there must be at least two.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #859301
#29. Like the phoenix, socialism is reborn from every pile of ashes left day in, day out, by burnt-out human dreams and charred hopes.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #867313
#30. And the enticement to seek a rose without thorns is never far away and always difficult to resist.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #875027
#31. What is assumed to be the materialisation of the inner truth of the self is in fact an idealisation of the material - objectified - traces of consumer choices.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #880883
#32. 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.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #884218
#33. The consumerist culture insists that swearing eternal loyalty to anything and anybody is imprudent, since in this world new glittering opportunities crop up daily.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #908471
#34. The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #928607
#35. Madness is no madness when shared.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #930065
#36. Robbing humans of their faces and individuality is no less a form of evil than diminishing their dignity or looking for threats primarily among those who have immigrated or harbour different religious beliefs.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #969288
#37. Postmodernity means the exhilarating freedom to pursue anything, yet mind-boggling uncertainty as to what is worth pursuing and in the name of what one should pursue it.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #972432
#38. Rigidity of order is the artefact and sediment of the human agents ' freedom.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1020362
#39. What happens is never unpredictable: there are always breaches, carelessness, incompetence, omissions, which have not prevented the occurrence.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1056943
#40. If political rights are necessary to set social rights in place, social rights are indispensable to make political rights 'real' and keep them in operation. The two rights need each other for their survival; that survival can only be their joint achievement.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1089841
#41. Man is in his short sojourn on earth equal to God in His eternity.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1163874
#42. 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.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1176616
#43. The secret of every durable ... social system is the recasting of 'functional prerequisites' into behavioral motives for actors.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1197771
#44. There are other ways of finding satisfaction, recipes for human happiness, enjoyment, dignified and meaningful, gratifying life, than increased consumption that increases production.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1242983
#45. Marcus Aurelius appoints personal character and conscience the ultimate refuge of happiness-seekers: the only place where dreams of happiness, doomed to die childless and intestate anywhere else, are not bound to be frustrated.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1266226
#46. Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1353591
#47. As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1397835
#48. For intellectual authority, the appropriate version of Descartes 's cogito would be today: I am talked about, therefore I am.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1518347
#49. Desire and love act at cross purposes. love is a net cast on eternity, desire is a stratagem to be spared the chores of net weaving.
True to their nature, love would strive to perpetuate the desire. Desire, on the other hand, would shun love's shackles.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1526096
#50. This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1540654
#51. A consumerist attitude may lubricate the wheels of the economy; it sprinkles sand into the bearings of morality.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1553315
#52. 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.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1572151
#53. 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.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1594198
#54. We live in a globalising world. That means that all of us, consciously or not, depend on each other. Whatever we do or refrain from doing affects the lives of people who live in places we'll never visit.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1672660
#55. I suspect that one of capitalism's crucial assets derives from the fact that the imagination of economists, including its critics, lags well behind its own inventiveness, the arbitrariness of its undertaking and the ruthlessness of the way in which it proceeds.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1678803
#56. As can be seen, 'crisis', in its proper sense, expresses something positive, creative and optimistic, because it involves a change, and may be a rebirth after a break-up. It indicates separation, certainly, but also choice, decisions and therefore the opportunity to express an opinion.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1765150
#57. These values are 'distinctly European' because they were thought out, articulated and refined in the part of the planet that tends to be described as 'Europe proper', and their articulation and refinement cannot be separated from the course of Europe's history.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1781849
#58. Real dialogue isn't about talking to people who believe the same things as you.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1802807
#59. The economic crisis, so conveniently operated and driven by the markets, by financial groups, by the needs of a globalized economy, faces the task of restoring social control, which the crisis of modernity lost sight of.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1815511
#60. 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.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes #1817718

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