Top 50 Zygmunt Bauman Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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 modern society, over and over again.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

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

— Zygmunt Bauman

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

— Zygmunt Bauman

4. “We live in a globalising world. That means that all of us, consciously or not, depend on each other. Whatever we do or refrain from doing affects the lives of people who live in places we’ll never visit.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “You judge a society by the decency of living of the weakest.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “Madness is no madness when shared.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

13. “Relationships, like cars, should undergo regular services to make sure they are still roadworthy.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

14. “This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You’re not lower class, you are excluded – outside.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

15. “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

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

— Zygmunt Bauman

17. “Happiness needs one-upmanship.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

18. “What has been cut apart cannot be glued back together. Abandon all hope of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of fluid modernity.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

19. “En la historia del mundo, nunca antes los no-lugares han ocupado tanto espacio”. Los.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

20. “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

21. “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

22. “Real dialogue isn’t about talking to people who believe the same things as you.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

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

— Zygmunt Bauman

24. “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

25. “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.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

26. “We already have – thanks to technology, development, skills, the efficiency of our work – enough resources to satisfy all human needs. But we don’t have enough resources, and we are unlikely ever to have, to satisfy human greed.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

27. “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

28. “What is assumed to be the materialisation of the inner truth of the self is in fact an idealisation of the material – objectified – traces of consumer choices.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

29. “There is always a suspicion... that one is living a lie or a mistake; that something crucially important has been overlooked, missed, neglected, left untried, and unexplored; that a vital obligation to one’s own authentic self has not been met or that some chances of unknown happiness completely different from any happiness experienced before have to been taken up in time and are bound to be lost forever if they continue to be neglected.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

30. “From the start and to this very day, modernity was about forcing nature to serve obediently human needs, ambitions and desires –.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

31. “Marcus Aurelius appoints personal character and conscience the ultimate refuge of happiness-seekers: the only place where dreams of happiness, doomed to die childless and intestate anywhere else, are not bound to be frustrated.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

32. “As can be seen, ‘crisis’, in its proper sense, expresses something positive, creative and optimistic, because it involves a change, and may be a rebirth after a break-up. It indicates separation, certainly, but also choice, decisions and therefore the opportunity to express an opinion.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

33. “For intellectual authority, the appropriate version of Descartes ’s cogito would be today: I am talked about, therefore I am.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

34. “What happens is never unpredictable: there are always breaches, carelessness, incompetence, omissions, which have not prevented the occurrence.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

35. “I was leftwing, I am leftwing, and I will die leftwing.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

36. “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

37. “And the enticement to seek a rose without thorns is never far away and always difficult to resist.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

38. “Utopia’ used to denote a coveted, dreamt-of distant goal to which progress should, could and would eventually bring the seekers after a world better serving human needs. In contemporary dreams, however, the image of ‘progress’ seems to have moved from the discourse of shared improvement to that of individual survival. Progress is no longer thought about in the context of an urge to rush ahead, but in connection with a desperate effort to stay in the race.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

39. “This was replaced by a widespread and aggressive individualism whereby everyone looks out for himself, at the expense of others and without worrying about the good of society.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

40. “The relations individuals enter into with other individuals nowadays have been described as ‘pure’ – meaning ‘no strings attached’, no unconditional obligations assumed and so no predetermination, and therefore no mortgaging, of the future. The sole foundation and only reason for the relationship to continue is, it has been said, the amount of mutual satisfaction drawn from it.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

41. “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

42. “In other words, 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. Love is akin to transcendence; it is but another name for creative drive and as such is fraught with risks, as all creation is never sure where it is going to end.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

43. “For I showed men how they were the cause of their own unhappiness and, in consequence, how they might avoid it’, writes Rousseau to Voltaire in his famous letter on the Lisbon disaster, laying the foundations of a new spirit that desacralizes nature, removing it from divine will and entrusting it to the hands of man.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

44. “A consumerist attitude may lubricate the wheels of the economy; it sprinkles sand into the bearings of morality.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

45. “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 it proceeds.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

46. “Consuming life cannot be other than a life of rapid learning, but it also needs to be a life of swift forgetting.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

47. “In a world of global dependencies with no corresponding global polity and few tools of global justice, the rich of the world are free to pursue their own interests while paying no attention to the rest.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

48. “To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

49. “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.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

50. “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