Quote

Power, in a nutshell, is the ability to get things done, and politics is the ability to decide which things need to be done.

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
Done
Needs
Nutshell
Things
Decide
Politics
Ability
Political
Power
Need

More quotes by Zygmunt Bauman

Image
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.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
We belong to talking, not what talking is about... Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Everybody is in trouble, including the up-and-coming economic miracles of China, Brazil or India.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Our consumer-oriented economy wouldn't survive without economic growth. The whole mechanism depends on invention and insinuation of novelties, arousing new wants, seduction and temptation. This is the problem we face - much more than recapitalizing the banks. The question is: Is that kind of economy sustainable?
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Alas, you don't need monsters for monstrous deeds to be accomplished.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
After many years of thinking, reading and writing and looking, I came to believe that there are two basic, essential values which are indispensable for humane, decent, dignified life: one is freedom, and the other is security.
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
Unlike 'real relationships', 'virtual relationships' are easy to enter and to exit. They look smart and clean, feel easy to use, when compared with the heavy, slow-moving, messy real stuff.
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
The inequality between the world's individuals is staggering.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
In Celan's words a Jew is a man with a little book under the shoulder. We are the keepers of tradition.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
As to describing me as an outsider throughout, and an outsider through and through - I have no reason to disagree.
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