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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
Weakest
Decency
Judge
Judging
Society
Living

More quotes by Zygmunt Bauman

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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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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.
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The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.
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Relationships, like cars, should undergo regular services to make sure they are still roadworthy.
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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.
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If there is something to permit the distinction between solid and liquid phases of modernity (that is, arranging them in an order of succession), it is the change in both the manifest and latent purpose behind the effort.
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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.
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The secret of every durable ... social system is the recasting of 'functional prerequisites' into behavioral motives for actors.
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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.
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Once upon a time, when I was young, people saw a wedding as an event that determined the rest of their life. For a rising number of people today, it is quite normal to try and err, marry, divorce, marry again.
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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.
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Man is in his short sojourn on earth equal to God in His eternity.
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Throughout early modernity there were very strong pressures on Jews to assimilate. Assimilating meant cutting your ties with the community of origin.
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.
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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.
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I worry about the Israeli moral standard, Israeli humanity.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Never paint epic canvases during the revolution, because the revolutionaries will tear them apart.
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You cannot have a cake and eat it too. Either you eat it, or you have it.
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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.
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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