Quote

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

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
Explain
Allow
Skills
Happen
Happens
Diagnose
Going
Sociological
Life
Predict
Acquired

More quotes by Zygmunt Bauman

Image
Throughout early modernity there were very strong pressures on Jews to assimilate. Assimilating meant cutting your ties with the community of origin.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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
Image
The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Our bad luck is that our writing is linear, while we think circularly.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Relationships, like cars, should undergo regular services to make sure they are still roadworthy.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
In Montreal, where I taught in 1970, I met many people. The only ones who said to me they were Canadians, were Jews. All the rest were Scotts, Irish, English, French, Swedes.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
In a world of global dependencies with no corresponding global polity and few tools of global justice, the rich of the world are free to pursue their own interests while paying no attention to the rest.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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
Image
We belong to talking, not what talking is about... Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
The question of identity has separated from the issue of 'assimilation', having lost much of its drama and become, so to speak, a secular problem.
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
Attempts to tame the wayward and domesticate the riotous, to make the unknowable predictable and enchain the free-roaming - all such things sound the death knell to love. Eros won't outlast duality. As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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
Image
As long as being a stranger and surrounded by strangers was seen as a temporary irritant, a smallest departure from the binding rules of conduct by a member of a minority, was taken for a major crime justifying deportation.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
The value of other people is that they have something unique to offer.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
You judge a society by the decency of living of the weakest
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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
Image
It is easy now to break the vows. It is even easier to part your ways if vows haven't been taken.
Zygmunt Bauman