1. “Madness is no madness when shared.” – Zygmunt Bauman
2. “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
3. “This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You’re not lower class, you are excluded – outside.” – Zygmunt Bauman
4. “Happiness needs one-upmanship.” – Zygmunt Bauman
5. “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
6. “If only evil things are done by evil people… Life would be then safe, morally elevated, cozy – we know how to spot evil people and what to do with them to pay for their crimes.” – Zygmunt Bauman
7. “Unlike ‘real relationships’, ‘virtual relationships’ are easy to enter and to exit. They look smart and clean, feel easy to use, when compared with the heavy, slow-moving, messy real stuff.” – Zygmunt Bauman
8. “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
9. “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
10. “Security was the demand which set in motion labour movements in history; trade unions, friendly societies, consumer cooperatives were all about compensating for the impotence of individual resistance.” – Zygmunt Bauman
11. “It is easy now to break the vows. It is even easier to part your ways if vows haven’t been taken.” – Zygmunt Bauman
12. “I was leftwing, I am leftwing, and I will die leftwing.” – Zygmunt Bauman
13. “The visual does seem to me the most thoroughly grasped and recorded among my impressions; sight seems to be my principal sense organ, and “seeing” supplies the key metaphors for reporting the perception.” – Zygmunt Bauman
14. “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
15. “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
16. “As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” – Zygmunt Bauman
17. “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
18. “Each extra lock on the entry door in response to successive rumours of foreign-looking criminals in cloaks full of daggers and each next revision of the diet in response to a successive ‘food panic’ makes the world look more treacherous and fearsome, and prompts more defensive actions – that will, alas, add more vigour to the self-propagating capacity of fear.” – Zygmunt Bauman
19. “What happens is never unpredictable: there are always breaches, carelessness, incompetence, omissions, which have not prevented the occurrence.” – Zygmunt Bauman
20. “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
21. “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
22. “Relationships, like cars, should undergo regular services to make sure they are still roadworthy.” – Zygmunt Bauman
23. “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
24. “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
25. “Given enough time, the mobiles would train the eyes to look without seeing.” – Zygmunt Bauman
26. “Real dialogue isn’t about talking to people who believe the same things as you.” – Zygmunt Bauman
27. “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
28. “The more security we have, the less freedom there is; more freedom means less security. You can hardly enough of both at the same time.” – Zygmunt Bauman
29. “Man is in his short sojourn on earth equal to God in His eternity.” – Zygmunt Bauman
30. “Our bad luck is that our writing is linear, while we think circularly.” – Zygmunt Bauman
31. “For one to be free there must be at least two.” – Zygmunt Bauman
32. “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
33. “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
34. “Most young people today prefer just to move in together and stay together as long, but no longer, as satisfaction lasts.” – Zygmunt Bauman
35. “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
36. “The task is to keep the lost opportunities of the past alive.” – Zygmunt Bauman
37. “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
38. “You judge a society by the decency of living of the weakest.” – Zygmunt Bauman
39. “With every death, a world is disappearing.” – Zygmunt Bauman
40. “You are a stranger, I am a stranger, we all remain strangers, and nevertheless we can like or even love each other.” – Zygmunt Bauman
41. “The art of walking on quicksand is still beyond me. What I learned is only how difficult this art is to master and how hard people need to struggle to learn it.” – Zygmunt Bauman
42. “The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.” – Zygmunt Bauman
43. “Today’s youth have been cast in a condition of liminal drift, with no way of knowing whether it is transitory or permanent.” – Zygmunt Bauman
44. “Consuming life cannot be other than a life of rapid learning, but it also needs to be a life of swift forgetting.” – Zygmunt Bauman
45. “Freedom is the slogan of the strong, who feel self confident, self sufficient to do it alone.” – Zygmunt Bauman
46. “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
47. “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
48. “Now people are worried not about the prospects of buying new things, but about how to pay for the things they bought yesterday, a year ago or years before. It is, as Americans like to say, “a wholly different kind of ball-game”.” – Zygmunt Bauman
49. “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
50. “Life purpose may be shifted from achieving a ‘steady state’ (an equilibrium between desires and plausibilities) to the excitement of running after novelties. In other words, be guided by new desires, not by extant needs.” – Zygmunt Bauman
51. “The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.” – Zygmunt Bauman