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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.

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
Book
Keepers
Men
Shoulder
Jew
Shoulders
Tradition
Words
Littles
Little

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You are a stranger, I am a stranger, we all remain strangers, and nevertheless we can like or even love each other.
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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.
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You judge a society by the decency of living of the weakest
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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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I guess I am doomed to remain an outsider to the end, lacking as I am the indispensable qualities of an academic insider: school loyalty, conformity to the procedure, and readiness to obey by the school-endorsed criteria of cohesion and consistency.
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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.
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I was leftwing, I am leftwing, and I will die leftwing.
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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.
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In our world of rampant individualisation, relationships are mixed blessings. They vacillate between a sweet dream and a nightmare, and there is no telling when one turns into the other.
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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.
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Life purpose may be shifted from achieving a 'steady state' (an equilibrium between desires and plausibilities) to the excitement of running after novelties. In other words, be guided by new desires, not by extant needs.
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Capitalism proceeds through creative destruction. What is created is capitalism in a 'new and improved' form - and what is destroyed is self-sustaining capacity, livelihood and dignity of its innumerable and multiplied 'host organisms' into which all of us are drawn/seduced one way or another.
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In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change - as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.
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For one to be free there must be at least two.
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The planet is full and we will be rubbing shoulders forever. There is nowhere else to go.
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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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Ingeniously, capitalism discovered that the economy may be moved not by satisfying existing needs, but by creating new ones.
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