Home > Author > Zygmunt Bauman
1 " The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear. "
― Zygmunt Bauman , Liquid Modernity
2 " 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! You don't, after all, stick to your car, or computer, or iPod, when better ones appear. "
― Zygmunt Bauman
3 " Justice' primes the human habitat for peaceful and friendly togetherness. It sets the table - the round table - for polylogue and negotiations guided by the will of agreement. Justice is the most 'socializing' of values. "
― Zygmunt Bauman , Europe: An Unfinished Adventure
4 " If political rights are necessary to set social rights in place, social rights are indispensable to make political rights 'real' and keep them in operation. The two rights need each other for their survival; that survival can only be their joint achievement. "
― Zygmunt Bauman , Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age
5 " 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. And so there is no, and cannot be, a democracy, an autonomous society, without autonomous citizens - that is, citizens endowed with individual liberty and individual responsibility for the ways they use it. That liberty is another value - though unthinkable in separation from the value of democracy. Democracy rests on the freedom of its citizens, and citizens rest their confidence of being free and the courage to be free on the democracy of their polis. The two make each other and are made in the process of that making. "
6 " For one to be free there must be at least two. "
― Zygmunt Bauman , الحرية
7 " 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. "
8 " To understand how that astounding moral blindness was possible, it is helpful to think of the workers of an armament plant who rejoice in the 'stay of execution' of their factory thanks to big new orders, while at the same time honestly bewailing the massacres visited upon each other by Ethiopians and Eritreans; or to think how it is possible that the 'fall in commodity prices' may be universally welcomed as good news while 'starvation of African children' is equally universally, and sincerely, lamented. "
― Zygmunt Bauman , Modernity and the Holocaust
9 " Occupying the bottom end of the inequality ladder, and becoming a 'collateral victim' of a human action or a natural disaster, interact the way the opposite poles of magnets do: they tend to gravitate towards each other. "
10 " Like the phoenix, socialism is reborn from every pile of ashes left day in, day out, by burnt-out human dreams and charred hopes. "
11 " Given enough time, the mobiles would train the eyes to look without seeing. "
― Zygmunt Bauman , Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds
12 " The updated version of Descartes’s Cogito is ‘I am seen, therefore I am’ – and that the more people who see me, the more I am… "
― Zygmunt Bauman , Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity
13 " It is not necessarily the case that the denizens of postmodern - privatized and commodified - society enjoy the sum-total of greater happiness (one would still wish to know how to measure happiness objectively and compare it), and that they experience their worries as less serious and painful; what does truly matter is that it would not occur to them to lay the blame for such troubles they may suffer at the door of the state, and even less to expect the remedies to be handed over through that door. "
― Zygmunt Bauman , Modernity And Ambivalence
14 " The desire to demonize others is based on the ontological uncertainties. "
15 " It is sterile and dangerous to believe that one dominates the entire world thanks to the Internet when one does not have enough culture to filter good information from bad information for consumption, all of them in competition for the unbearably fleeting and distracted attention of potential customers, striving to capture that attention beyond the blink of an eye. "
16 " Aggressivität und Ablehnung kommen wie die anderen harten, rauen und bitteren Stammespraktiken in der Maske des Schutzgewährens und Abschirmens der "Gemeinschaft" daher. "
― Zygmunt Bauman , Retrotopia
17 " Wie bei den Leichen, die man in den Krematorien von Auschwitz und Treblinka verbrannt hat, benötigt man auch hierfür keinen zusätzlichen Brennstoff; ständig schwelende Wut entzündet sich immer wieder neu an sich selbst. "
18 " (...) na era da instantaneidade (...) A duração deixa de ser um recurso para tornar-se um risco; o mesmo pode ser dito de tudo o que é volumoso, sólido e pesado - tudo o que impede ou restringe o movimento. (...) corpos volumosos tiveram seu dia: outrora testemunhavam o poder e a força de seus donos; hoje anunciam a derrota na próxima rodada de aceleração e assim sinalizam a impotência. Corpo esguio e adequação ao movimento, roupa leve e tênis, telefones celulares (inventados para o uso dos nômades que têm que estar "constantemente em contato"), pertences portáteis ou descartáveis - são os principais objetos culturais da era da instantaneidade. Peso e tamanho, e acima de tudo a gordura (literal ou metafórica) acusada da expansão de ambos, compartilham o destino da durabilidade. São os perigos que devemos temer e contra os quais devemos lutar; melhor ainda, manter distância. "
19 " Loïc Wacquant ha sugerido recientemente que "la vorágine securitaria es a la criminalidad lo que la pornografía es a las relaciones amorosas", ya que ignora totalmente las causas y el significado de su objeto ostensible y reduce su tratamiento a una simple adopción de "posturas" seleccionadas exclusivamente por su espectacularidad. Pero también porque se la exhibe públicamente no por ella misma, sino por la propia publicidad en sí. La exhibición pública condensa la atención en "los reincidentes, los mendigos molestos, los refugiados nómadas, los inmigrantes pendientes de expulsión, las prostitutas de las aceras y otros tipos de marginados sociales que ensucian las calles de las metrópolis para disgusto de la 'gente decente'. Es con ese fin con el que se escenifica una batalla contra el crimen en forma de un "excitante espectáculo burocrático-mediático". [...] el peso de la delincuencia con respecto a otros temas de preocupación pública tiende a medirse -al igual que el de todos los demás objetos de atención pública- en función de la extensión y la intensidad de la publicidad que se le dedica, más que por sus cualidades intrínsecas. "
― Zygmunt Bauman , الخوف السائل
20 " La promesa moderna de conjurar o derrotar una tras otra todas las amenazas para la seguridad humana se ha cumplido hasta cierto punto, [...] La que evidentemente no se ha materializado, sin embargo, es la expectativa de liberación de los miedos nacidos de la inseguridad y nutridos por ella. [...] Combinada con la convicción de que, aún así, esa promesa es algo que podría hacerse realidad de algún modo, esa frustración de esperanzas añade la afrenta de la impotencia a la ofensa de la inseguridad, y canaliza la ansiedad en forma de deseo de dar con los culpables y de castigarlos, así como de obtener indemnización/compensación por las esperanzas que ya han sido traicionadas. "
