Zygmunt Bauman > Quotes

“The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust

“Real dialogue isn’t about talking to people who believe the same things as you.”
― Zygmunt Bauman

“For one to be free there must be at least two.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Freedom

“Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves. ”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences

“The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity

“The updated version of Descartes’s Cogito is ‘I am seen, therefore I am’ – and that the more people who see me, the more I am…”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity

“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.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences

“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.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity

“Desire and love act at cross purposes. love is a net cast on eternity, desire is a stratagem to be spared the chores of net weaving.

True to their nature, love would strive to perpetuate the desire. Desire, on the other hand, would shun love's shackles.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds

“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.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity

“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.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life

“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.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents

“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.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age

“A consumerist attitude may lubricate the wheels of the economy; it sprinkles sand into the bearings of morality.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity

“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.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life

“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.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life

“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.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty

“To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, State of Crisis

“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.”
― Zygmunt Bauman

“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.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds

“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 fully satisfied, no desires considered ultimate. There ought to be a proviso 'until further notice' attached to any oath of loyalty and any commitment. It is but the volatility, the in-built temporality of all engagements that truly counts; it counts more than the commitment itself, which is anyway not allowed to outlast the time necessary for consuming the object of desire (or, rather, the time sufficient for the desirability of that object to wane).”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences

“En cuanto al poder, se aleja a toda vela de la calle y del mercado, de las asambleas y de los parlamentos, de los gobiernos locales y de los nacionales, más allá del alcance del control de los ciudadanos, hacia la extraterritorialidad de las redes electrónicas. En la actualidad, los principios estratégicos favoritos de los que tienen el poder son el escape, la evasión y la retirada, y su estado ideal es la invisibilidad.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity

“Precisar tornar-se o que já se é é a característica da vida moderna.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity

“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.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust

“Os filhos estão entre as aquisições mais caras que o consumidor médio pode fazer ao longo de toda a sua vida. Em termos puramente monetários, eles custam mais do que um carro luxuoso do ano, uma volta ao mundo em um cruzeiro ou até mesmo uma mansão. Pior ainda, o custo total tende a crescer com o tempo, e seu volume não pode ser fixado de antemão nem estimado com algum grau de certeza. [...] Além disso, ter filhos é, em nossa época, uma questão de decisão, não um acidente - o que aumenta a ansiedade. Tê-los ou não é comprovadamente a decisão com maiores consequências e de maior alcance que existe, e portanto também a mais angustiante e estressante.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds

“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.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age

“From the start and to this very day, modernity was about forcing nature to serve obediently human needs, ambitions and desires –”
― Zygmunt Bauman, State of Crisis

“Postmodernity means the exhilarating freedom to pursue anything, yet mind-boggling uncertainty as to what is worth pursuing and in the name of what one should pursue it.”
― Zygmunt Bauman

“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.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?

“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.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?