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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

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

More quotes by Zygmunt Bauman

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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
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With globalization and with a lot of power evaporating from the nation-states, the late-19th century established hierarchies of importance, or 'pecking orders' of cultures, presenting assimilation as an advancement or promotion, dissolved.
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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.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Capitalism proceeds through creative destruction. What is created is capitalism in a 'new and improved' form - and what is destroyed is self-sustaining capacity, livelihood and dignity of its innumerable and multiplied 'host organisms' into which all of us are drawn/seduced one way or another.
Zygmunt Bauman
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I worry about the Israeli moral standard, Israeli humanity.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Alas, you don't need monsters for monstrous deeds to be accomplished.
Zygmunt Bauman
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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
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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.
Zygmunt Bauman
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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
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At the turn of the twenty-first century, the richest 5 percent of people receive one-third of total global income, as much as the poorest 80 percent.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Being condemned by fate to perpetual togetherness, we better make that shared fate into our shared, consciously and gladly embraced, destiny.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Attempts to tame the wayward and domesticate the riotous, to make the unknowable predictable and enchain the free-roaming - all such things sound the death knell to love. Eros won't outlast duality. As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Man is in his short sojourn on earth equal to God in His eternity.
Zygmunt Bauman
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It is easy now to break the vows. It is even easier to part your ways if vows haven't been taken.
Zygmunt Bauman
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As long as being a stranger and surrounded by strangers was seen as a temporary irritant, a smallest departure from the binding rules of conduct by a member of a minority, was taken for a major crime justifying deportation.
Zygmunt Bauman
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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
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Everybody is in trouble, including the up-and-coming economic miracles of China, Brazil or India.
Zygmunt Bauman
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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
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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
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An ideal and flawless freedom, complete freedom, enabling without disabling, is I believe an oxymoron in metaphysics as much as it is an unreachable goal in social life.
Zygmunt Bauman