Zygmunt Bauman

Happiness needs one-upmanship.

— Zygmunt Bauman

A good society is a society which believes that it is not good enough; that it is the task of the collectivity to insure individuals against individually suffered misfortune; and that the quality of society is measured by the quality of life of its weakest, just like the carrying power of a bridge is measured by its weakest pillar.

— Zygmunt Bauman

Our vulnerability [to ressentiment], is unavoidable (and probably incurable) in a kind of society in which relative equality of political and other rights and formally acknowledged social equality go hand in hand with enormous differences in genuine power, possessions and education; a society in which everyone “has the right” to consider himself equal to everybody else, while in fact being unequal to them.

— Zygmunt Bauman

As Christopher Marlowe’s Faust learned the hard way, wishing for a moment of bliss to say “the same” indefinitely is guaranteed to procure indefinite commitment to hell instead of indefinite happiness. … A state of rest would not be a state of happiness but of boredom.

— Zygmunt Bauman

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

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

— Zygmunt Bauman

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

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

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

We live in a world of communication - everyone gets information about everyone else. There is universal comparison and you don't just compare yourself with the people next door, you compare yourself to people all over the world and with what is being presented as the decent, proper and dignified life. It's the crime of humiliation.

— Zygmunt Bauman

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

— Zygmunt Bauman

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

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

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

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

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