Quote

After many years of thinking, reading and writing and looking, I came to believe that there are two basic, essential values which are indispensable for humane, decent, dignified life: one is freedom, and the other is security.

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
Freedom
Basic
Two
Essential
Many
Essentials
Writing
Security
Believe
Came
Dignified
Years
Looking
Humane
Thinking
Reading
Indispensable
Life
Values
Decent

More quotes by Zygmunt Bauman

Image
A reliable assurance of the right and ability to dismantle the constructed structure must be offered, before the job of construction starts in earnest.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
With every death, a world is disappearing.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
The so called progress, time marching on, is not a straight line, but a pendulum.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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
Image
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.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
The secret of every durable ... social system is the recasting of 'functional prerequisites' into behavioral motives for actors.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Security is the slogan for people who feel unable to function by their own means.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
A whole world is taken to the grave with the dead person each one of us is unique and unrepeatable.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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
Image
This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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
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
Cornelius Castoriadis, the great French social philosopher of Greek origin, was asked once by an exasperated interviewer: What do you want, Mr. Castoriadis - to change humanity? He answered: No, God forbid, I only want humanity to change itself, as it has done so many times in the past. I would be inclined to answer the same way.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Freedom is the slogan which speaks to the ears of people who feel strong enough to manage on their own using their own resources, who can do without dependency because they can do without others caring for them.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
What is assumed to be the materialisation of the inner truth of the self is in fact an idealisation of the material - objectified - traces of consumer choices.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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
Image
Where we hope to land (and where we do land, though only for a fleeting moment, enough for tired wings to catch the wind anew) is a 'there' which we thought of little and knew of even less.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
The Bible provides unity without imposing uniformity, without prohibiting change it is a standing invitation to thinking and to take responsibilities.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
I guess my claustrophobia is incurable - feeling, as I tend to, ill at ease in any closed room, and always tempted to find out what is on the other side of the door.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
We belong to talking, not what talking is about... Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.
Zygmunt Bauman