Zygmunt Bauman Quotes

Man is in his short sojourn on earth equal to God in His eternity.

Ingeniously, capitalism discovered that the economy may be moved not by satisfying existing needs, but by creating new ones.

As to describing me as an outsider throughout, and an outsider through and through - I have no reason to disagree.

All the skills which I have acquired during my sociological life allow me to diagnose and explain what is going on, but not to predict what will happen.

The more security we have, the less freedom there is; more freedom means less security. You can hardly enough of both at the same time.

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.

Fully "biodegradable" structures are nowadays the ideal and the standards to which most, if not all structures, struggle to measure up.

I guess my claustrophobia is incurable - feeling, as I tend to, ill at ease in any closed room, and always tempted to find out what is on the other side of the door.

When opting out from partnership is so easy, every minor disagreement is perceived as a major catastrophe and irreparable disaster.

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.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the richest 5 percent of people receive one-third of total global income, as much as the poorest 80 percent.

In Celan's words a Jew is "a man with a little book under the shoulder." We are the keepers of tradition.

Everybody is in trouble, including the up-and-coming economic miracles of China, Brazil or India.

It is easy now to break the vows. It is even easier to part your ways if vows haven't been taken.

I am not a prophet; I cannot predict what will happen.

In Montreal, where I taught in 1970, I met many people. The only ones who said to me they were Canadians, were Jews. All the rest were Scotts, Irish, English, French, Swedes.

Christ could not create a codified 'Christian ethics'; such a thing would be a contradiction in terms.

Every interpretation is but an introduction to another interpretation, and that is how Talmud pages are printed.

With my tongue in one cheek only, I'd suggest that were our palaeolithic ancestors to discover the peer-review dredger, we would be still sitting in caves.

The question of identity has separated from the issue of 'assimilation', having lost much of its drama and become, so to speak, a secular problem.

I worry about the Israeli moral standard, Israeli humanity.

With every death, a world is disappearing.

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.

Community is like a big family.

Security is the slogan for people who feel unable to function by their own means.

The secret of every durable ... social system is the recasting of 'functional prerequisites' into behavioral motives for actors.

Throughout early modernity there were very strong pressures on Jews to assimilate. Assimilating meant cutting your ties with the community of origin.

Freedom without security portends chaos, perpetual anxiety and fear.

Freedom is the slogan of the strong, who feel self confident, self sufficient to do it alone.

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.

A reliable assurance of the right and ability to dismantle the constructed structure must be offered, before the job of construction starts in earnest.

"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.

The Bible provides unity without imposing uniformity, without prohibiting change; it is a standing invitation to thinking and to take responsibilities.

The proof of my Jewishness is that iniquities done by Israel pain me much more than iniquities perpetrated by any other country.

Most young people today prefer just to move in together and stay together as long, but no longer, as satisfaction lasts.

The task is to keep the lost opportunities of the past alive.

We are always confronted with choice.

Postmodernity means the exhilarating freedom to pursue anything, yet mind-boggling uncertainty as to what is worth pursuing and in the name of what one should pursue it.