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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.

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
Social
Flawless
Without
Enabling
Much
Metaphysics
Believe
Ideal
Life
Complete
Ideals
Disabling
Goal
Unreachable
Freedom
Oxymoron

More quotes by 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.
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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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Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.
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Once upon a time, when I was young, people saw a wedding as an event that determined the rest of their life. For a rising number of people today, it is quite normal to try and err, marry, divorce, marry again.
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Never paint epic canvases during the revolution, because the revolutionaries will tear them apart.
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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.
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We are living at the moment in revolutionary times. Argentineans probably are more aware of it than anybody else, because they tasted it several years earlier - but now the whole world is in trouble.
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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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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.
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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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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 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.
Zygmunt Bauman
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Now people are worried not about the prospects of buying new things, but about how to pay for the things they bought yesterday, a year ago or years before. It is, as Americans like to say, a wholly different kind of ball-game.
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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Everybody is in trouble, including the up-and-coming economic miracles of China, Brazil or India.
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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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.
Zygmunt Bauman
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The problem of insufficient security was, until quite recently, a matter of a minority now it is becoming very quickly a majority matter. That is a major change.
Zygmunt Bauman
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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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Relationships, like cars, should undergo regular services to make sure they are still roadworthy.
Zygmunt Bauman