Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Zygmunt Bauman
Age: 91 †
Born: 1925
Born: November 19
Died: 2017
Died: January 9
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Poznan
Complete
Life
Ideals
Disabling
Goal
Unreachable
Freedom
Oxymoron
Social
Flawless
Enabling
Without
Metaphysics
Much
Ideal
Believe

More quotes by Zygmunt Bauman

Image
Freedom without security portends chaos, perpetual anxiety and fear. Security without freedom means slavery. So, each on its own is awful only together they make for a good life. But, a big but: being both necessary, complementing each other, they are nevertheless virtually incompatible.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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
Image
Everybody is in trouble, including the up-and-coming economic miracles of China, Brazil or India.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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
Image
Freedom is the slogan of the strong, who feel self confident, self sufficient to do it alone.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
For intellectual authority, the appropriate version of Descartes 's cogito would be today: I am talked about, therefore I am.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
In a world of global dependencies with no corresponding global polity and few tools of global justice, the rich of the world are free to pursue their own interests while paying no attention to the rest.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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
Image
Most young people today prefer just to move in together and stay together as long, but no longer, as satisfaction lasts.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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
Image
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.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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
Image
With globalization and with a lot of power evaporating from the nation-states, the late-19th century established hierarchies of importance, or 'pecking orders' of cultures, presenting assimilation as an advancement or promotion, dissolved.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Today's youth have been cast in a condition of liminal drift, with no way of knowing whether it is transitory or permanent.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
For one to be free there must be at least two.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
Never paint epic canvases during the revolution, because the revolutionaries will tear them apart.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
I worry about the Israeli moral standard, Israeli humanity.
Zygmunt Bauman
Image
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
Image
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