Quote

In our world of rampant individualisation, relationships are mixed blessings. They vacillate between a sweet dream and a nightmare, and there is no telling when one turns into the other.

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
Sweet
Turns
Rampant
Dream
Mixed
World
Blessings
Nightmare
Relationships
Telling
Blessing

More quotes by 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
Alas, you don't need monsters for monstrous deeds to be accomplished.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
People do not choose a government that will bring the market within their control instead, the market in every way conditions governments to bring the people within its control.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Middle class people, the bourgeoisie, they are also feeling frightened at the moment. Some fear losing their fortunes some go bankrupt some are thinking about suicide. They don't know if they will retain the beautiful house that they bought, or what will happen to the five family cars.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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
Image
I worry about the Israeli moral standard, Israeli humanity.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
When people think, rightly or wrongly, that marriage is forever, they are stimulated to seek and find a resolution, a modus vivendi, whenever they quarrel.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Community came to be seen as a chat-group: you switch on as long as your pleasure lasts, then push another button and switch off. Very easy to go in and out, join and leave.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Now people are worried not about the prospects of buying new things, but about how to pay for the things they bought yesterday, a year ago or years before. It is, as Americans like to say, a wholly different kind of ball-game.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
We are already and will remain all in the same boat.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Freedom is the slogan of the strong, who feel self confident, self sufficient to do it alone.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
It is more or less clear that one idea which should emerge from the crash, whatever happens with the attempts to save the banks from bankruptcy and people from being evicted from their homes, is that this kind of life is unsustainable. We cannot go on like this... something must be done.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
The secret of every durable ... social system is the recasting of 'functional prerequisites' into behavioral motives for actors.
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
The question of identity has separated from the issue of 'assimilation', having lost much of its drama and become, so to speak, a secular problem.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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
Image
As the run-by-capital society of producers turned since into the run-by-capital society of consumers, I would say that the main, indeed meta, function of the governments has become now to assure that it is the meetings between commodities and the consumers, and credit issuers and the borrowers, that regularly take place.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
What is happening now is that the number of people who are not strong enough or do not feel strong enough to decide to live without the security provided by the community or the state, is going up.
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
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