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You judge a society by the decency of living of the weakest

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
Judging
Society
Living
Weakest
Decency
Judge

More quotes by Zygmunt Bauman

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With my tongue in one cheek only, I'd suggest that were our palaeolithic ancestors to discover the peer-review dredger, we would be still sitting in caves.
Zygmunt Bauman
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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
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Freedom without security portends chaos, perpetual anxiety and fear.
Zygmunt Bauman
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A whole world is taken to the grave with the dead person each one of us is unique and unrepeatable.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Our bad luck is that our writing is linear, while we think circularly.
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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The planet is full and we will be rubbing shoulders forever. There is nowhere else to go.
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 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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We are always confronted with choice.
Zygmunt Bauman
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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
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In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change - as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.
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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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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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
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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
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If Christ would have left Christian ethics codified on the table, then he wouldn't produce moral beings choosing between good and evil, but conformists fulfilling orders. I think the same can be said about the Bible.
Zygmunt Bauman
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I think that the essential instruction of the Bible is very much topical. The sole problem is that with every change of historical setting, you need to readjust the interpretation of the message.
Zygmunt Bauman
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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
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State governments seek local remedies for the globally fabricated deprivations and miseries in vain - just as the individuals-by-the-decree-of-fate (read: by the impact of deregulation) seek in vain the individual solutions to the socially fabricated life problems.
Zygmunt Bauman