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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
Explain
Allow
Skills
Happen
Happens
Diagnose
Going
Sociological
Life
Predict
Acquired

More quotes by Zygmunt Bauman

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The visual does seem to me the most thoroughly grasped and recorded among my impressions sight seems to be my principal sense organ, and seeing supplies the key metaphors for reporting the perception.
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.
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Our bad luck is that our writing is linear, while we think circularly.
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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.
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Middle class people, the bourgeoisie, they are also feeling frightened at the moment. Some fear losing their fortunes some go bankrupt some are thinking about suicide. They don't know if they will retain the beautiful house that they bought, or what will happen to the five family cars.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Jews are no longer pressed and obliged to fight, hide or deny their Jewishness. What for? No one actually requires today to abandon the idiosyncrasy of some other culture or ethnic tradition. The great achievement of this last period is that we have been slowly, sometimes reluctantly, yet steadily, learning the art of living with differences.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Christ could not create a codified 'Christian ethics' such a thing would be a contradiction in terms.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Madness is no madness when shared.
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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Happiness needs one-upmanship.
Zygmunt Bauman
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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.
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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You judge a society by the decency of living of the weakest
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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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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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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You cannot have a cake and eat it too. Either you eat it, or you have it.
Zygmunt Bauman
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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
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The more security we have, the less freedom there is more freedom means less security. You can hardly enough of both at the same time.
Zygmunt Bauman
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The task is to keep the lost opportunities of the past alive.
Zygmunt Bauman