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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

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

More quotes by Zygmunt Bauman

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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.
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The value of other people is that they have something unique to offer.
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The so called progress, time marching on, is not a straight line, but a pendulum.
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In a nutshell: if freedom visualised by the Enlightenment and demanded/promised by Marx was made to the measure of the ideal producer the market-promoted freedom is designed with the ideal consumer in mind neither of the two is more genuine than the other.
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The proof of my Jewishness is that iniquities done by Israel pain me much more than iniquities perpetrated by any other country.
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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.
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Today's youth have been cast in a condition of liminal drift, with no way of knowing whether it is transitory or permanent.
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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.
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Every interpretation is but an introduction to another interpretation, and that is how Talmud pages are printed.
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Man is in his short sojourn on earth equal to God in His eternity.
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As to describing me as an outsider throughout, and an outsider through and through - I have no reason to disagree.
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Christ could not create a codified 'Christian ethics' such a thing would be a contradiction in terms.
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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.
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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
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We have found ourselves in the period of interregnum: the old works no more, the new is not yet born. But the awareness that without it being born we are all marked for demise, is already much alive, as is the awareness that the hard nut we must urgently crack is not the presence of too many poor, but too many rich.
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Alas, you don't need monsters for monstrous deeds to be accomplished.
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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.
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You judge a society by the decency of living of the weakest
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Power, in a nutshell, is the ability to get things done, and politics is the ability to decide which things need to be done.
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An ideal and flawless freedom, complete freedom, enabling without disabling, is I believe an oxymoron in metaphysics as much as it is an unreachable goal in social life.
Zygmunt Bauman