Quote

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
Faces
Depends
Novelty
Problem
Wouldn
Consumer
Without
Growth
Banks
Insinuation
Whole
Question
Mechanism
Novelties
Much
Wants
Consumers
Arousing
Kind
Economy
Temptation
Seduction
Economic
Invention
Oriented
Face
Survive
Sustainable

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.
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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.
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When opting out from partnership is so easy, every minor disagreement is perceived as a major catastrophe and irreparable disaster.
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The visual does seem to me the most thoroughly grasped and recorded among my impressions sight seems to be my principal sense organ, and seeing supplies the key metaphors for reporting the perception.
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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.
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A whole world is taken to the grave with the dead person each one of us is unique and unrepeatable.
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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.
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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.
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Freedom is the slogan which speaks to the ears of people who feel strong enough to manage on their own using their own resources, who can do without dependency because they can do without others caring for them.
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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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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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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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Cornelius Castoriadis, the great French social philosopher of Greek origin, was asked once by an exasperated interviewer: What do you want, Mr. Castoriadis - to change humanity? He answered: No, God forbid, I only want humanity to change itself, as it has done so many times in the past. I would be inclined to answer the same way.
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Man is in his short sojourn on earth equal to God in His eternity.
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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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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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Never paint epic canvases during the revolution, because the revolutionaries will tear them apart.
Zygmunt Bauman
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For one to be free there must be at least two.
Zygmunt Bauman
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People do not choose a government that will bring the market within their control instead, the market in every way conditions governments to bring the people within its control.
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