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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

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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
Life
Predict
Acquired
Explain
Allow
Skills
Happen
Happens
Diagnose
Going
Sociological

More quotes by 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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In Celan's words a Jew is a man with a little book under the shoulder. We are the keepers of tradition.
Zygmunt Bauman
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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
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Indeed, I did not truly belong to any school, order, intellectual camaraderie or clique I did not apply for admission to any of them, let alone did much to deserve an invitation nor would I be listed by any of them - at least listed unqualifiedly - as one of us.
Zygmunt Bauman
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I suspect that one of capitalism's crucial assets derives from the fact that the imagination of economists, including its critics, lags well behind its own inventiveness, the arbitrariness of its undertaking and the ruthlessness of the way in which it proceeds.
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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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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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
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I was leftwing, I am leftwing, and I will die leftwing.
Zygmunt Bauman
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The descent of Israel from the morally towering position of a 'light for the nations' to the lowest of the low and one of the last relics of bygone shameful times of merciless imperialism, conquest, exploitation is on the cards.
Zygmunt Bauman
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This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.
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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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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If only evil things are done by evil people... Life would be then safe, morally elevated, cozy - we know how to spot evil people and what to do with them to pay for their crimes.
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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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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It is so true that in liquid modernity freedom was, so to speak, let off the leash, and for a quite a number of years the freedom of choice was in principle unlimited. One result was the weakening of inter-human bonds, particularly inherited bonds, and the counterfactual assumption that individuals must and can fend for themselves.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Everybody is in trouble, including the up-and-coming economic miracles of China, Brazil or India.
Zygmunt Bauman
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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
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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