Top 153 Quotes & Sayings by Zygmunt Bauman
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
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.
Power, in a nutshell, is the ability to get things done, and politics is the ability to decide which things need to be done.
This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.
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.
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.
We belong to talking, not what talking is about... Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.
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.
Relationships, like cars, should undergo regular services to make sure they are still roadworthy.
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.
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.
Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better.
Happiness needs one-upmanship.
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.
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.
The consumerist culture insists that swearing eternal loyalty to anything and anybody is imprudent, since in this world new glittering opportunities crop up daily.
Partnerships are increasingly seen through the prism of promises and expectations, and as a kind of product for consumers: satisfaction on the spot, and if not fully satisfied, return the product to the shop or replace it with a new and improved one! You don't, after all, stick to your car, or computer, or iPod, when better ones appear.
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.
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.
As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
We live in a world of communication - everyone gets information about everyone else. There is universal comparison and you don't just compare yourself with the people next door, you compare yourself to people all over the world and with what is being presented as the decent, proper and dignified life. It's the crime of humiliation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was leftwing, I am leftwing, and I will die leftwing.
There are other ways of finding satisfaction, recipes for human happiness, enjoyment, dignified and meaningful, gratifying life, than increased consumption that increases production.
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.
Like the phoenix, socialism is reborn from every pile of ashes left day in, day out, by burnt-out human dreams and charred hopes.
The planet is full and we will be rubbing shoulders forever. There is nowhere else to go.
Ingeniously, capitalism discovered that the economy may be moved not by satisfying existing needs, but by creating new ones.
Our bad luck is that our writing is linear, while we think circularly.
We are always confronted with choice.
The value of other people is that they have something unique to offer.
The more security we have, the less freedom there is; more freedom means less security. You can hardly enough of both at the same time.
For one to be free there must be at least two.
The woe of mortality makes humans God-like. It is because we know that we must die that we are so busy making life. It is because we are aware of mortality that we preserve the past and create the future. Mortality is ours without asking--but immortality is something we must build ourselves. Immortality is not a mere absence of death; it is defiance and denial of death. It is 'meaningful' only because there is death, that implacable reality which is to be defied.
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.
The so called "progress," "time marching on," is not a straight line, but a pendulum.
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.
The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.
Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.
Madness is no madness when shared.
You are a stranger, I am a stranger, we all remain strangers, and nevertheless we can like or even love each other.
I worry about younger generations who were born to view their country trampling on humanity of everyone that comes in its way, as the 'normal state of affairs" - because they knew no other. We know how easy it is to shed, under such circumstances, the thin and frail veneer of civilization, not to mention the moral standards of which the Jews were presumed to be the world's teachers.
Once we realize that the strangers are here forever and won't go away, then, like husband and wife in the old-style marriage, we would try to find a way of living together peacefully and with mutual benefit. The sooner we understand that in a globalized world the diasporic nature of cohabitation is never likely to end, that it will always be with us, I believe such modus vivendi will be found.
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.
A whole world is taken to the grave with the dead person; each one of us is unique and unrepeatable.
We are already and will remain all in the same boat.
You cannot have a cake and eat it too. Either you eat it, or you have it.
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.
Security without freedom means slavery.
We live in a world of communication, everyone gets information about everyone else. There is universal comparison and you don't just compare yourself with the people next door, you compare yourself to people all over the world and with what is being presented as the decent, proper and dignified life. It's the crime of humiliation.
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.
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.
'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.
It is so true that in liquid modernity freedom was, so to speak, let off the leash, and for a quite a number of years the freedom of choice was "in principle" unlimited. One result was the weakening of inter-human bonds, particularly inherited bonds, and the counterfactual assumption that individuals must and can fend for themselves.
You judge a society by the decency of living of the weakest
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.
We have found ourselves in the period of "interregnum": the old works no more, the new is not yet born. But the awareness that without it being born we are all marked for demise, is already much alive, as is the awareness that the hard nut we must urgently crack is not the presence of "too many poor", but "too many rich".
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