Zygmunt Bauman Quotes

Zygmunt Bauman was a Polish sociologist and philosopher. He was driven out of Poland by a political purge in 1968 engineered by the Communist government of the Polish People's Republic and forced to give up his Polish citizenship to move to Israel. Three years later he moved to the United Kingdom. He resided in England from 1971, where he studied at the London School of Economics and became Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, later Emeritus. Bauman was one of the world's most eminent social theorists, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity. Wikipedia  

✵ 19. November 1925 – 9. January 2017
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Zygmunt Bauman: 16   quotes 0   likes

Famous Zygmunt Bauman Quotes

“For one to be free there must be at least two.”

Source: Freedom

“The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.”

Source: Modernity and the Holocaust

“Pascal suggests that people avoid looking inwards and keep running in the vain hope of escaping a face-to-face encounter with their predicament, which is to face up to their utter insignificance whenever they recall the infinity of the universe. And he censures them and castigates them for doing so. It is, he says, that morbid inclination to hassle around rather than stay put which ought to be blamed for all unhappiness. One could, however, object that Pascal, even if only implicitly, does not present us with the choice between a happy and an unhappy life, but between two kinds of unhappiness: whether we choose to run or stay put, we are doomed to be unhappy. The only (putative and misleading!) advantage of being on the move (as long as we keep moving) is that we postpone for a while the moment of that truth. This is, many would agree, a genuine advantage of running out of rather than staying in our rooms—and most certainly it is a temptation difficult to resist. And they will choose to surrender to that temptation, allow themselves to be allured and seduced—if only because as long as they remain seduced they will manage to stave off the danger of discovering the compulsion and addiction that prompts them to run, screened by what is called “freedom of choice” or “self-assertion.””

But, inevitably, they will end up longing for the virtues they once possessed but have now abandoned for the sake of getting rid of the agony which practicing them, and taking responsibility for that practice, might have caused.
Source: The Art of Life (2008), p. 37.

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes about happiness

Zygmunt Bauman Quotes

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

[paraphrasing the view of Seneca], p. 34.
The Art of Life (2008)

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