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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
Confronted
Choice
Choices
Always

More quotes by 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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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.
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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Ingeniously, capitalism discovered that the economy may be moved not by satisfying existing needs, but by creating new ones.
Zygmunt Bauman
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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
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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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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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When people think, rightly or wrongly, that marriage is forever, they are stimulated to seek and find a resolution, a modus vivendi, whenever they quarrel.
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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If Christ would have left Christian ethics codified on the table, then he wouldn't produce moral beings choosing between good and evil, but conformists fulfilling orders. I think the same can be said about the Bible.
Zygmunt Bauman
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A whole world is taken to the grave with the dead person each one of us is unique and unrepeatable.
Zygmunt Bauman
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What has been cut apart cannot be glued back together. Abandon all hope of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of fluid modernity.
Zygmunt Bauman
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While a few poor countries are catching up with the rich world, the differences between the richest and poorest individuals around the globe are huge and likely growing.
Zygmunt Bauman
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If only evil things are done by evil people... Life would be then safe, morally elevated, cozy - we know how to spot evil people and what to do with them to pay for their crimes.
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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'I am insecure' means: I can't cope on my own. The odds are overwhelming. I can't resist them on my own. I need us to join forces, stand shoulder to shoulder, march hand in hand.
Zygmunt Bauman
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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
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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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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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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