Polish sociologist (1925-2017)
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.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Europe: An Unfinished Adventure
Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Globalization: The Human Consequences
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.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Al Jazeera, July 23, 2016
A consumerist attitude may lubricate the wheels of the economy; it sprinkles sand into the bearings of morality.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity
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.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
This Is Not a Diary
Love takes captive and puts the apprehended in custody; it makes an arrest, for the prisoner's protection.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds
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.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Culture as Praxis
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.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Freedom
The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Modernity and the Holocaust
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.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
The Art of Life
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).
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
"Ziggy Stardust", New Humanist, May 31, 2007
Desire and love act at cross purposes. love is a net cast on eternity, desire is a stratagem to be spared the chores of net weaving. True to their nature, love would strive to perpetuate the desire. Desire, on the other hand, would shun love's shackles.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds
No longer can democracy and freedom be fully and truly secure in one country, or even in a group of countries; their defence in a world saturated with injustice and inhabited by billions of humans denied human dignity will inevitably corrupt the very values they are meant to defend.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty
The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Liquid Modernity
As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
On the Frailty of Human Bonds
Beneath the dream of fame, another dream, a dream of no longer dissolving and staying dissolved in the grey, faceless and insipid mass of commodities, a dream of turning into a notable, noticed and coveted commodity, a talked about commodity, a commodity standing out from the mass of commodities, a commodity impossible to overlook, to deride, to be dismissed. In a society of consumers, turning into a desirable commodity is the stuff of which dreams, and fairy tales, are made.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Consuming Life
Thrown into a vast open sea with no navigation charts and all the marker buoys sunk and barely visible, we have only two choices left: we may rejoice in the breath-taking vistas of new discoveries -- or we may tremble out of fear of drowning.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Globalization: The Human Consequences
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.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Modernity and the Holocaust
It is not in craving after ready-made, complete and finished things that love finds its meaning -- but in the urge to participate in the becoming of such things.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds
Nonentity, the demeaning and humiliating insignificance of the individual bodily presence in the world by comparison with the unperturbed eternity of the world itself, has haunted philosophers (and non-philosophers, during their brief spells of falling into and staying in a philosophical mood) for more than two millennia. In the Middle Ages it was raised to the rank of the highest purpose and supreme concern of mortals, and deployed to promote spiritual values over the pleasures of the flesh--as well as to explain (and, hopefully argue away) the pain and misery of the brief earthly existence as a necessary and therefore welcome prelude to the endless bliss of the afterlife. It returned with the advent of the modern era in a new garb: that of the futility of individual interests and concerns, shown to be abominably short-lived, fleeting and vagrant when juxtaposed with the interests of "the social whole"--the nation, the state, the cause.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
The Art of Life