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We are always confronted with choice.

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
Always
Confronted
Choice
Choices

More quotes by Zygmunt Bauman

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As the run-by-capital society of producers turned since into the run-by-capital society of consumers, I would say that the main, indeed meta, function of the governments has become now to assure that it is the meetings between commodities and the consumers, and credit issuers and the borrowers, that regularly take place.
Zygmunt Bauman
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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.
Zygmunt Bauman
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There are other ways of finding satisfaction, recipes for human happiness, enjoyment, dignified and meaningful, gratifying life, than increased consumption that increases production.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Now people are worried not about the prospects of buying new things, but about how to pay for the things they bought yesterday, a year ago or years before. It is, as Americans like to say, a wholly different kind of ball-game.
Zygmunt Bauman
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For one to be free there must be at least two. Freedom signifies a social relation, an asymmetry of social conditions: essentially it implies social difference--it presumes and implies the presence of social division. Some can be free only in so far as there is a form of dependence they can aspire to escape.
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.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Human attention tends to be focused on the satisfactions relationships are hoped to bring, precisely because somehow they have not been truly satisfactory. And if they do satisfy, the price of this satisfaction has often been found to be unacceptable.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Our consumer-oriented economy wouldn't survive without economic growth. The whole mechanism depends on invention and insinuation of novelties, arousing new wants, seduction and temptation. This is the problem we face - much more than recapitalizing the banks. The question is: Is that kind of economy sustainable?
Zygmunt Bauman
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Freedom without security portends chaos, perpetual anxiety and fear. Security without freedom means slavery. So, each on its own is awful only together they make for a good life. But, a big but: being both necessary, complementing each other, they are nevertheless virtually incompatible.
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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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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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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Partnerships are increasingly seen through the prism of promises and expectations, and as a kind of product for consumers: satisfaction on the spot, and if not fully satisfied, return the product to the shop or replace it with a new and improved one! You don't, after all, stick to your car, or computer, or iPod, when better ones appear.
Zygmunt Bauman
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The so called progress, time marching on, is not a straight line, but a pendulum.
Zygmunt Bauman
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The secret of every durable ... social system is the recasting of 'functional prerequisites' into behavioral motives for actors.
Zygmunt Bauman
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With globalization and with a lot of power evaporating from the nation-states, the late-19th century established hierarchies of importance, or 'pecking orders' of cultures, presenting assimilation as an advancement or promotion, dissolved.
Zygmunt Bauman
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We have a reversal of a longstanding trend, from rising inequality across nations and constant or declining inequality within nations, to declining inequality across nations and rising inequality within them.
Zygmunt Bauman
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The art of walking on quicksand is still beyond me. What I learned is only how difficult this art is to master and how hard people need to struggle to learn it.
Zygmunt Bauman
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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
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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