Zygmunt Bauman Quotes

37 quotes in 668 categories

• The consumerist culture insists that swearing eternal loyalty to anything and anybody is imprudent, since in this world new glittering opportunities crop up daily.
• There are other ways of finding satisfaction, recipes for human happiness, enjoyment, dignified and meaningful, gratifying life, than increased consumption that increases production.
• 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…
• Ideally, nothing should be embraced by a consumer firmly, nothing should command a commitment till death do us part, no needs should be seen as…
• What is assumed to be the materialisation of the inner truth of the self is in fact an idealisation of the material - objectified -…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Madness is no madness when shared.
• Happiness needs one-upmanship.
• 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…
• We already have - thanks to technology, development, skills, the efficiency of our work - enough resources to satisfy all human needs. But we don't…
• 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…
• 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 carrying power of a bridge is not the average strength of the pillars, but the strength of the weakest pillar. I have always believed…
• 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…
• 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…
• We belong to talking, not what talking is about... Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.
• Power, in a nutshell, is the ability to get things done, and politics is the ability to decide which things need to be done.

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