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
It is so true that in liquid modernity freedom was, so to speak, let off the leash, and for a quite a number of years the freedom of choice was in principle unlimited. One result was the weakening of inter-human bonds, particularly inherited bonds, and the counterfactual assumption that individuals must and can fend for themselves.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
For intellectual authority, the appropriate version of Descartes 's cogito would be today: I am talked about, therefore I am.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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 people next door, you compare yourself to people all over the world and with what is being presented as the decent, proper and dignified life. It's the crime of humiliation.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
I did not and do not think of the solidity-liquidity conundrum as a dichotomy I view those two conditions as a couple locked, inseparably, in a dialectical bond.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
The proof of my Jewishness is that iniquities done by Israel pain me much more than iniquities perpetrated by any other country.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
State governments seek local remedies for the globally fabricated deprivations and miseries in vain - just as the individuals-by-the-decree-of-fate (read: by the impact of deregulation) seek in vain the individual solutions to the socially fabricated life problems.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Freedom is the slogan which speaks to the ears of people who feel strong enough to manage on their own using their own resources, who can do without dependency because they can do without others caring for them.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
A whole world is taken to the grave with the dead person each one of us is unique and unrepeatable.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
I worry about the Israeli moral standard, Israeli humanity.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Jews are no longer pressed and obliged to fight, hide or deny their Jewishness. What for? No one actually requires today to abandon the idiosyncrasy of some other culture or ethnic tradition. The great achievement of this last period is that we have been slowly, sometimes reluctantly, yet steadily, learning the art of living with differences.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
We are living at the moment in revolutionary times. Argentineans probably are more aware of it than anybody else, because they tasted it several years earlier - but now the whole world is in trouble.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
I guess I am doomed to remain an outsider to the end, lacking as I am the indispensable qualities of an academic insider: school loyalty, conformity to the procedure, and readiness to obey by the school-endorsed criteria of cohesion and consistency.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
For one to be free there must be at least two. Freedom signifies a social relation, an asymmetry of social conditions: essentially it implies social difference--it presumes and implies the presence of social division. Some can be free only in so far as there is a form of dependence they can aspire to escape.
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
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.
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
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
There are other ways of finding satisfaction, recipes for human happiness, enjoyment, dignified and meaningful, gratifying life, than increased consumption that increases production.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
You judge a society by the decency of living of the weakest
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
I suspect that one of capitalism's crucial assets derives from the fact that the imagination of economists, including its critics, lags well behind its own inventiveness, the arbitrariness of its undertaking and the ruthlessness of the way in which it proceeds.
Zygmunt Bauman