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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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Zygmunt Bauman
Age: 91 †
Born: 1925
Born: November 19
Died: 2017
Died: January 9
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Poznan
Without
Growth
Banks
Insinuation
Whole
Question
Mechanism
Novelties
Much
Wants
Consumers
Arousing
Kind
Economy
Temptation
Seduction
Economic
Invention
Oriented
Face
Survive
Sustainable
Faces
Depends
Novelty
Problem
Wouldn
Consumer

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The Bible provides unity without imposing uniformity, without prohibiting change it is a standing invitation to thinking and to take responsibilities.
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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.
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I did not and do not think of the solidity-liquidity conundrum as a dichotomy I view those two conditions as a couple locked, inseparably, in a dialectical bond.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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We live in a world of communication, everyone gets information about everyone else. There is universal comparison and you don't just compare yourself with the people next door, you compare yourself to people all over the world and with what is being presented as the decent, proper and dignified life. It's the crime of humiliation.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Christ could not create a codified 'Christian ethics' such a thing would be a contradiction in terms.
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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.
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We belong to talking, not what talking is about... Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.
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Fully biodegradable structures are nowadays the ideal and the standards to which most, if not all structures, struggle to measure up.
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Where we hope to land (and where we do land, though only for a fleeting moment, enough for tired wings to catch the wind anew) is a 'there' which we thought of little and knew of even less.
Zygmunt Bauman
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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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