Quote

In a consumer society, people wallow in things, fascinating, enjoyable things. If you define your value by the things you acquire and surround yourself with, being excluded is humiliating.

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
Consumers
Acquire
Wallow
Fascinating
Humiliating
Value
Excluded
Society
Enjoyable
Values
Consumer
Things
Surround
People
Define

More quotes by Zygmunt Bauman

Image
We are always confronted with choice.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Why are people so concerned with relativism? If you look back in history, millions of people were killed because of someone's dogmatic views, but I do not remember anybody being killed due to the tolerance of difference, to relativism ethically relativism does not seem to be such an awful thing, really.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Security without freedom means slavery.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Most young people today prefer just to move in together and stay together as long, but no longer, as satisfaction lasts.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Everybody is in trouble, including the up-and-coming economic miracles of China, Brazil or India.
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
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
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
We have found ourselves in the period of interregnum: the old works no more, the new is not yet born. But the awareness that without it being born we are all marked for demise, is already much alive, as is the awareness that the hard nut we must urgently crack is not the presence of too many poor, but too many rich.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Avoid the crowd, avoid mass audiences, keep your own counsel, which is the counsel of philosophy of wisdom you can acquire and make your own.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
I worry about the Israeli moral standard, Israeli humanity.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
A reliable assurance of the right and ability to dismantle the constructed structure must be offered, before the job of construction starts in earnest.
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
Every interpretation is but an introduction to another interpretation, and that is how Talmud pages are printed.
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
The problem of insufficient security was, until quite recently, a matter of a minority now it is becoming very quickly a majority matter. That is a major change.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
All the skills which I have acquired during my sociological life allow me to diagnose and explain what is going on, but not to predict what will happen.
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
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