Quote

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.

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
States
Excitement
Extant
May
Desires
Novelties
Needs
Achieve
Shifted
Life
State
Equilibrium
Purpose
Guided
Words
Achieving
Desire
Novelty
Running
Steady

More quotes by 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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Our bad luck is that our writing is linear, while we think circularly.
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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When opting out from partnership is so easy, every minor disagreement is perceived as a major catastrophe and irreparable disaster.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Security without freedom means slavery.
Zygmunt Bauman
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The value of other people is that they have something unique to offer.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Community came to be seen as a chat-group: you switch on as long as your pleasure lasts, then push another button and switch off. Very easy to go in and out, join and leave.
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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At the turn of the twenty-first century, the richest 5 percent of people receive one-third of total global income, as much as the poorest 80 percent.
Zygmunt Bauman
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With my tongue in one cheek only, I'd suggest that were our palaeolithic ancestors to discover the peer-review dredger, we would be still sitting in caves.
Zygmunt Bauman
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The inequality between the world's individuals is staggering.
Zygmunt Bauman
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The risk of the Holocaust is not that it will be forgotten, but that it will be embalmed and surrounded by monuments and used to absolve all future sins.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.
Zygmunt Bauman
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For intellectual authority, the appropriate version of Descartes 's cogito would be today: I am talked about, therefore I am.
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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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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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
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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.
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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Security was the demand which set in motion labour movements in history trade unions, friendly societies, consumer cooperatives were all about compensating for the impotence of individual resistance.
Zygmunt Bauman