Zygmunt Bauman Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.

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.

Man is in his short sojourn on earth equal to God in His eternity.

The population of every country is nowadays a collection of
diasporas. Every sizable city is now an aggregate of ethnic, religious,
and lifestyle enclaves in which the line dividing insiders
from outsiders is a hotly contested issue, while the right to
draw that line, to keep it intact and make it unassailable, is
the prime stake in the skirmishes over influence and battles
for recognition that follow.

Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.

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.

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.

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.

For I showed men how they were the cause of their own unhappiness and, in consequence, how they might avoid it', writes Rousseau to Voltaire in his famous letter on the Lisbon disaster, laying the foundations of a new spirit that desacralizes nature, removing it from divine will and entrusting it to the hands of man.

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 one turns into the other.

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.

What prompts so many commentators to speak of the 'end of
history', of post-modernity, 'second modernity' and 'surmodernity',
or otherwise to articulate the intuition of a radical change in the
arrangement of human cohabitation and in social conditions under
which life-politics is nowadays conducted, is the fact that the long
effort to accelerate the speed of movement has presently reached its
'natural limit' .

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.

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.

What happens is never unpredictable: there are always breaches, carelessness, incompetence, omissions, which have not prevented the occurrence.

We belong to talking, not what talking is about ... Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.

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.

Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

There is always a suspicion...that one is living a lie or a mistake; that something crucially important has been overlooked, missed, neglected, left untried, and unexplored; that a vital obligation to one's own authentic self has not been met or that some chances of unknown happiness completely different from any happiness experienced before have to been taken up in time and are bound to be lost forever if they continue to be neglected.

The secret of every durable ... social system is the recasting of 'functional prerequisites' into behavioral motives for actors.

Real dialogue isn't about talking to people who believe the same things as you.

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.

Rigidity of order is the artefact and sediment of the human agents ' freedom.

Beneath the dream of fame, another dream, a dream of no longer dissolving and staying dissolved in the grey, faceless and insipid mass of commodities, a dream of turning into a notable, noticed and coveted commodity, a talked about commodity, a commodity standing out from the mass of commodities, a commodity impossible to overlook, to deride, to be dismissed. In a society of consumers, turning into a desirable commodity is the stuff of which dreams, and fairy tales, are made.

People are cast in the underclass because they are seen as totally useless; as a nuisance pure and simple, something the rest of us could do nicely without. In a society of consumers - a world that evaluates anyone and anything by their commodity value - they are people with no market value; they are the uncommoditised men and women, and their failure to obtain the status of proper commodity coincides with (indeed, stems from) their failure to engage in a fully fledged consumer activity. They are failed consumers, walking symbols of the disasters awaiting fallen consumers, and of the ultimate destiny of anyone failing to acquit herself or himself in the consumer's duties. All in all, they are the 'end is nigh' or the 'memento mori' sandwich men walking the streets to alert or frighten the bona fide consumers.

A consumerist attitude may lubricate the wheels of the economy; it sprinkles sand into the bearings of morality.

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

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.

This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.

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

Every type of social setting produces its own visions of the dangers that threaten its identity, visions made to the measure of the kind of social order it struggles to achieve or to retain. If the self-definition, simultaneously descriptive and postulative, can be thought of as a photographic replica of the setting, visions of threats tend to be the negatives of those photographs. Or, to put this in psychoanalytical terms, threats are projections of society's own inner ambivalence, about its own ways and means, about the fashion in which that society lives and intends to live.

[..] the innate tendency of a society of consumers to instil in their members a willingness to accord other people the same - and no more - respect as they are trained to feel and to show to consumer goods, the objects designed and destined for instantaneous, and possibly untroubled satisfaction, with no strings attached.

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

A society notorious for effacing the boundary which once separated the private from the public, for making it a public virtue and obligation to publicly expose the private, and for wiping away from public communication anything that resists being reduced to private confidences, together with those who refuse to confide them.

In other words, it is not in craving after ready-made, complete and finished things that love finds its meaning ― but in the urge to participate in the becoming of such things. Love is akin to transcendence; it is but another name for creative drive and as such is fraught with risks, as all creation is never sure where it is going to end.

Madness is no madness when shared.

Our vulnerability [to ressentiment], is unavoidable (and probably incurable) in a kind of society in which relative equality of political and other rights and formally acknowledged social equality go hand in hand with enormous differences in genuine power, possessions and education; a society in which everyone "has the right" to consider himself equal to everybody else, while in fact being unequal to them.

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.

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.

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.

Debate is never finished; it can't be, lest democracy be no longer democratic and society be stripped of or forfeit its autonomy. Democracy means that the citizen's task is never complete. Democracy exists through persevering and unyielding citizens' concern. Once that concern is put to sleep, democracy expires.
And so there is no, and cannot be, a democracy, an autonomous society, without autonomous citizens - that is, citizens endowed with individual liberty and individual responsibility for the ways they use it. That liberty is another value - though unthinkable in separation from the value of democracy. Democracy rests on the freedom of its citizens, and citizens rest their confidence of being free and the courage to be free on the democracy of their polis. The two make each other and are made in the process of that making.

One thing which even the most seasoned and discerning masters of the art of choice do not and cannot choose, is the society to be born into - and so we are all in travel, whether we like it or not. We have not been asked about our feelings anyway. Thrown into a vast open sea with no navigation charts and all the marker buoys sunk and barely visible, we have only two choices left: we may rejoice in the breath-taking vistas of new discoveries - or we may tremble out of fear of drowning. One option not really realistic is to claim sanctuary in a safe harbour; one could bet that what seems to be a tranquil haven today will be soon modernized, and a theme park, amusement promenade or crowded marina will replace the sedate boat sheds. The third option not thus being available, which of the two other options will be chosen or become the lot of the sailor depends in no small measure on the ship's quality and the navigation skills of the sailors. Not all ships are seaworthy, however. And so the larger the expanse of free sailing, the more the sailor's fate tends to be polarized and the deeper the chasm between the poles. A pleasurable adventure for the well-equipped yacht may prove a dangerous trap for a tattered dinghy. In the last account, the difference between the two is that between life and death.

To understand how that astounding moral blindness was possible, it is helpful to think of the workers of an armament plant who rejoice in the 'stay of execution' of their factory thanks to big new orders, while at the same time honestly bewailing the massacres visited upon each other by Ethiopians and Eritreans; or to think how it is possible that the 'fall in commodity prices' may be universally welcomed as good news while 'starvation of African children' is equally universally, and sincerely, lamented.

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.