Quotes by Zygmunt Bauman

About Zygmunt Bauman:

Zygmunt Bauman is a Polish sociologist. He has resided in England since 1971 after being driven out of Poland by an anti-semitic campaign engineered by the Communist government. Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leeds, Bauman is one of the world's most eminent social theorists writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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.

Zygmunt Bauman

We live in a world of communication - everyone gets information about everyone else. There is universal comparison and you don't just compare yourself with the people next door, you compare yourself to people all over the world and with what is being...

Zygmunt Bauman

The carrying power of a bridge is not the average strength of the pillars, but the strength of the weakest pillar. I have always believed that you do not measure the health of a society by GNP but by the condition of its worst off.

Zygmunt Bauman

There are other ways of finding satisfaction, recipes for human happiness, enjoyment, dignified and meaningful, gratifying life, than increased consumption that increases production.

Zygmunt Bauman

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 ...

Zygmunt Bauman

Partnerships are increasingly seen through the prism of promises and expectations, and as a kind of product for consumers: satisfaction on the spot, and if not fully satisfied, return the product to the shop or replace it with a new and improved one!...

Zygmunt Bauman

Attempts to tame the wayward and domesticate the riotous, to make the unknowable predictable and enchain the free-roaming - all such things sound the death knell to love.

Zygmunt Bauman

Like the phoenix, socialism is reborn from every pile of ashes left day in, day out, by burnt-out human dreams and charred hopes.

Zygmunt Bauman

Civilisation, the orderly world in which we live, is frail. We are skating on thin ice. There is a fear of a collective disaster. Terrorism, genocide, flu, tsunamis.

Zygmunt Bauman

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

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 i...

Zygmunt Bauman

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.

Zygmunt Bauman

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

Zygmunt Bauman

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

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.

Zygmunt Bauman

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

Zygmunt Bauman

Capitalism proceeds through creative destruction. What is created is capitalism in a 'new and improved' form - and what is destroyed is self-sustaining capacity, livelihood and dignity of its innumerable and multiplied 'host organisms' into which all...

Zygmunt Bauman

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

Human attention tends to be focused on the satisfactions relationships are hoped to bring, precisely because somehow they have not been truly satisfactory. And if they do satisfy, the price of this satisfaction has often been found to be unacceptable...

Zygmunt Bauman

This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.

Zygmunt Bauman

I was leftwing, I am leftwing, and I will die leftwing.

Zygmunt Bauman

Author Bio

  • NameZygmunt Bauman
  • DescriptionPolish philosopher
  • BornNovember 19, 1925
  • CountryUnited Kingdom; Poland
  • ProfessionPhilosopher; Author; Sociologist
  • AwardsMedal For Merit To Culture; Medal Of The 10th Anniversary Of People's Poland; Theodor W. Adorno Award; Princess Of Asturias Award - Communications And Humanities