Zygmunt Bauman Quotes

I am not a prophet; I cannot predict what will happen.

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.

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.

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

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!

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

I was leftwing, I am leftwing, and I will die leftwing.

It is more or less clear that one idea which should emerge from the crash, whatever happens with the attempts to save the banks from bankruptcy and people from being evicted from their homes, is that this kind of life is unsustainable. We cannot go on like this... something must be done.

You are a stranger, I am a stranger, we all remain strangers, and nevertheless we can like or even love each other.

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.

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.

The planet is full and we will be rubbing shoulders forever. There is nowhere else to go.

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

The visual does seem to me the most thoroughly grasped and recorded among my impressions; sight seems to be my principal sense organ, and "seeing" supplies the key metaphors for reporting the perception.

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.

I was watching the TV broadcasts interviewing people stranded at airports for days on end, losing their holidays, their important business meetings and the long-awaited ability to see their families... In short, suffering. No one complained, though! They kept repeating: we are so grateful for the care taken of our safety, for feeling. They were ready to surrender a good deal of their human dignity, individuality, freedom of choice.

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.

The so called "progress," "time marching on," is not a straight line, but a pendulum.

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

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

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 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.

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

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 is the slogan for people who feel unable to function by their own means.

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

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.

"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.

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

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.

Freedom without security portends chaos, perpetual anxiety and fear.

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

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.

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.

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".

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

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.

We have a reversal of a longstanding trend, from rising inequality across nations and constant or declining inequality within nations, to declining inequality across nations and rising inequality within them.

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

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.

It is easy now to break the vows. It is even easier to part your ways if vows haven't been taken.

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

Most young people today prefer just to move in together and stay together as long, but no longer, as satisfaction lasts.

There is less pressure on abandoning native communities: what for? There is nothing to be gained by it. On one hand, there are plenty tempting opportunities of experimenting with identities - being one kind of person today and a different the next day. On the other hand, there is little pressure to include the ethnic identity or religious identity into this mechanism, because now everybody is in a kind of Diaspora today.

Some dozens of years ago, there was a debate conducted between people insisting that "this loaf of bread must be redistributed," and the others who said "instead of worrying about redistributing it, cutting differently, let's make it bigger." A third possibility was not imagined: that the loaf may be shrinking. But it is now a genuine possibility. It is even acting upon already, like in the case of the American invasion of Afghanistan and of Iraq in order to secure the supply of petrol for the Americans addicted to gas-guzzling cars.

I worry about the Israeli moral standard, Israeli humanity.

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.

You cannot have a cake and eat it too. Either you eat it, or you have it.