Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Zygmunt Bauman
Age: 91 †
Born: 1925
Born: November 19
Died: 2017
Died: January 9
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Poznan
Humans
Ostensibly
Way
Arguably
Life
Premises
Urgent
Questioning
Services
Fellow
Fellows
Unquestionable

More quotes by Zygmunt Bauman

Image
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 absolve all future sins.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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
Image
Being condemned by fate to perpetual togetherness, we better make that shared fate into our shared, consciously and gladly embraced, destiny.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
All the skills which I have acquired during my sociological life allow me to diagnose and explain what is going on, but not to predict what will happen.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Indeed, I did not truly belong to any school, order, intellectual camaraderie or clique I did not apply for admission to any of them, let alone did much to deserve an invitation nor would I be listed by any of them - at least listed unqualifiedly - as one of us.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Christ could not create a codified 'Christian ethics' such a thing would be a contradiction in terms.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Once upon a time there were the Pampas in Argentina, that people could treat as empty lands and where they could run away from their problems from problem-ridden homes. That eventuality is no longer available.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
The problem of insufficient security was, until quite recently, a matter of a minority now it is becoming very quickly a majority matter. That is a major change.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Freedom without security portends chaos, perpetual anxiety and fear. Security without freedom means slavery. So, each on its own is awful only together they make for a good life. But, a big but: being both necessary, complementing each other, they are nevertheless virtually incompatible.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Why are people so concerned with relativism? If you look back in history, millions of people were killed because of someone's dogmatic views, but I do not remember anybody being killed due to the tolerance of difference, to relativism ethically relativism does not seem to be such an awful thing, really.
Zygmunt Bauman