Quote

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

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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
Power
Condition
Always
Measure
Pillar
Average
Weakest
Conditions
Pillars
Strength
Carrying
Health
Bridge
Worst
Bridges
Society
Believed

More quotes by Zygmunt Bauman

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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.
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The Bible provides unity without imposing uniformity, without prohibiting change it is a standing invitation to thinking and to take responsibilities.
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I guess my claustrophobia is incurable - feeling, as I tend to, ill at ease in any closed room, and always tempted to find out what is on the other side of the door.
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You are a stranger, I am a stranger, we all remain strangers, and nevertheless we can like or even love each other.
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Alas, you don't need monsters for monstrous deeds to be accomplished.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Christ could not create a codified 'Christian ethics' such a thing would be a contradiction in terms.
Zygmunt Bauman
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The more security we have, the less freedom there is more freedom means less security. You can hardly enough of both at the same time.
Zygmunt Bauman
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The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.
Zygmunt Bauman
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We are always confronted with choice.
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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
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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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We belong to talking, not what talking is about... Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Security was the demand which set in motion labour movements in history trade unions, friendly societies, consumer cooperatives were all about compensating for the impotence of individual resistance.
Zygmunt Bauman
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The consumerist culture insists that swearing eternal loyalty to anything and anybody is imprudent, since in this world new glittering opportunities crop up daily.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Ingeniously, capitalism discovered that the economy may be moved not by satisfying existing needs, but by creating new ones.
Zygmunt Bauman
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The tragedy is what - given the 'right circumstances,' - normal decent folks, like you and me, will do. This is what makes me worry whenever looking on the road that Israel entered and shows no intention of leaving.
Zygmunt Bauman
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I am not a prophet I cannot predict what will happen.
Zygmunt Bauman
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For intellectual authority, the appropriate version of Descartes 's cogito would be today: I am talked about, therefore I am.
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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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