Zygmunt Bauman Quotes
-
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.
→ -
The greatest economic minds of the 19th century, all of them without exception, considered economic growth as a temporary necessity. When all human needs are satisfied, then we will have a stable economy, reproducing every year the same things. We will stop straining ourselves worrying about development or growth. How naïve they were! One more reason to be reluctant about predicting the future. No doubt they were wiser than me, but even they made such a mistake!
→ -
With my tongue in one cheek only, I'd suggest that were our palaeolithic ancestors to discover the peer-review dredger, we would be still sitting in caves.
→ -
With every death, a world is disappearing.
→ -
Security without freedom means slavery.
→ -
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.
→ -
The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.
→ -
Cornelius Castoriadis, the great French social philosopher of Greek origin, was asked once by an exasperated interviewer: "What do you want, Mr. Castoriadis - to change humanity?" He answered: "No, God forbid, I only want humanity to change itself, as it has done so many times in the past." I would be inclined to answer the same way.
→ -
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.
→ -
We already have plenty of fundamentalism and fundamental sects like for instance Rabbi Schneerson and Chabad Lubavitch. They feel more secure because they are in the warm, caring/sharing community. This is the difference between community (Gemeinschaft) and what Ferdinand Tönnies called Gesellschaft: a kind of setting in which you have no rights to do anything unless you pay for it, and no right to get anything unless you prove that you are 'credit worthy'. In a Gemeinschaft, however, you have a place at the table guaranteed whatever happens.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
'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.
→ -
The question of identity has separated from the issue of 'assimilation', having lost much of its drama and become, so to speak, a secular problem.
→ -
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.
→ -
Once upon a time, when I was young, people saw a wedding as an event that determined the rest of their life. For a rising number of people today, it is quite normal to "try and err", marry, divorce, marry again.
→ -
Christ could not create a codified 'Christian ethics'; such a thing would be a contradiction in terms.
→ -
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.
→ -
We are already and will remain all in the same boat.
→ -
Once upon a time there were the Pampas in Argentina, that people could treat as "empty lands" and where they could run away from their problems from problem-ridden homes. That eventuality is no longer available.
→ -
Security is the slogan for people who feel unable to function by their own means.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
I worry about the Israeli moral standard, Israeli humanity.
→ -
Now people are worried not about the prospects of buying new things, but about how to pay for the things they bought yesterday, a year ago or years before. It is, as Americans like to say, "a wholly different kind of ball-game".
→ -
Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better.
→ -
The planet is full and we will be rubbing shoulders forever. There is nowhere else to go.
→ -
The proof of my Jewishness is that iniquities done by Israel pain me much more than iniquities perpetrated by any other country.
→ -
We are living at the moment in revolutionary times. Argentineans probably are more aware of it than anybody else, because they tasted it several years earlier - but now the whole world is in trouble.
→
Related Authors
-
Pierre Bourdieu Sociologist -
Manuel Castells Sociologist -
Theodor Adorno Sociologist -
Slavoj Žižek Philosopher -
Emile Durkheim Sociologist -
Antonio Gramsci Writer -
Ulrich Beck Sociologist -
Karl Marx Philosopher -
Jean-Francois Lyotard Philosopher -
Hannah Arendt Philosopher -
Max Weber Sociologist -
Cornelius Castoriadis Philosopher -
Anthony Giddens Life peer -
Jurgen Habermas Philosopher -
Richard Rorty Philosopher -
Jean Baudrillard Philosopher -
Jacques Derrida Philosopher -
Michel Foucault Philosopher -
Georg Simmel Philosopher -
Norbert Elias Sociologist