Quotes from Zygmunt Bauman

Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better.

In a consumer society, people wallow in things, fascinating, enjoyable things. If you define your value by the things you acquire and surround yourself with, being excluded is humiliating.

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

Power, in a nutshell, is the ability to get things done, and politics is the ability to decide which things need to be done.

As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

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.

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.

Where we hope to land (and where we do land, though only for a fleeting moment, enough for tired wings to catch the wind anew) is a 'there' which we thought of little and knew of even less.

I worry about the Israeli moral standard, Israeli humanity.

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.

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.

The consumerist culture insists that swearing eternal loyalty to anything and anybody is imprudent, since in this world new glittering opportunities crop up daily.

We belong to talking, not what talking is about... Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.

Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.

You judge a society by the decency of living of the weakest

Debate is never finished; it can't be, lest democracy be no longer democratic and society be stripped of or forfeit its autonomy. Democracy means that the citizen's task is never complete. Democracy exists through persevering and unyielding citizens' concern. Once that concern is put to sleep, democracy expires.

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.

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.

Love takes captive and puts the apprehended in custody; it makes an arrest, for the prisoner's protection.

There are two crucial values without which human life is simply inconceivable. One is security, a measure of security, feeling safe. The other is freedom, ability to self-assert, to do what you really would like to do and so on. They are both necessary. Security without freedom is slavery. Freedom without security is complete chaos where you are lost, abandoned, you don't know what to do.

Without the extension and/or transcendence of self-love, survival is not the kind of survival that sets humans apart from the beasts (and--never forget it--the angels).

It does not matter how many people chose moral duty over the rationality of self-preservation, what does matter is that some did. Evil is not all-powerful. It can be resisted. The testimony of the few who did resist shatters the authority of the logic of self-preservation. It shows it for what it is in the end: a choice.

As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The generic notion of culture is coined, therefore, in order to overcome the persistent philosophical opposition between the spiritual and the real, thought and matter, body and mind. The only necessary and irreplaceable component of the concept is the process of structuring, together with its objectified results--man-made structures.