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

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Most young people today prefer just to move in together and stay together as long, but no longer, as satisfaction lasts.
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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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Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better.
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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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When opting out from partnership is so easy, every minor disagreement is perceived as a major catastrophe and irreparable disaster.
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Today's youth have been cast in a condition of liminal drift, with no way of knowing whether it is transitory or permanent.
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Madness is no madness when shared.
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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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For intellectual authority, the appropriate version of Descartes 's cogito would be today: I am talked about, therefore I am.
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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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For one to be free there must be at least two.
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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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What is happening now is that the number of people who are not strong enough or do not feel strong enough to decide to live without the security provided by the community or the state, is going up.
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Middle class people, the bourgeoisie, they are also feeling frightened at the moment. Some fear losing their fortunes some go bankrupt some are thinking about suicide. They don't know if they will retain the beautiful house that they bought, or what will happen to the five family cars.
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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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In Celan's words a Jew is a man with a little book under the shoulder. We are the keepers of tradition.
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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.
Zygmunt Bauman
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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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Avoid the crowd, avoid mass audiences, keep your own counsel, which is the counsel of philosophy of wisdom you can acquire and make your own.
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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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