Peter > Peter's Quotes

“... To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”
― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good

“While any software system introduces some kind of formalization of the world, HCI (like AI) deals with formalizations of human cognition and activity. These are the issues that have lay at the heart of philosophical debate for centuries. In some ways, it would be hard to imagine a more philosophical enterprise.”
― Paul Dourish

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life