103 Quotes by Zygmunt Bauman

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.