Cornelius Castoriadis, the great French social philosopher of Greek origin, was asked once by an exasperated interviewer: "What do you want, Mr. Castoriadis - to change humanity?" He answered: "No, God forbid, I only want humanity to change itself, as it has done so many times in the past." I would be inclined to answer the same way.

Zygmunt Bauman

Categorized in : Past Humanity Done

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

liquid modern-life circumstances

As long as we say: "Alright, it is truth for me, and I believe in it and I am ready to fight for it, but I accept that others have different beliefs - and so let me have a closer look at what they believe" - we can gain from our intercourse thanks to our difference, not despite our difference.

Zygmunt Bauman

differences fighting believe

You judge a society by the decency of living of the weakest

Zygmunt Bauman

decency judging

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

mean people world

You are a stranger, I am a stranger, we all remain strangers, and nevertheless we can like or even love each other.

Zygmunt Bauman

love-each-other nevertheless stranger

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

smart real moving

The woe of mortality makes humans God-like. It is because we know that we must die that we are so busy making life. It is because we are aware of mortality that we preserve the past and create the future. Mortality is ours without asking--but immortality is something we must build ourselves. Immortality is not a mere absence of death; it is defiance and denial of death. It is 'meaningful' only because there is death, that implacable reality which is to be defied.

Zygmunt Bauman

meaningful reality past

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

questioning life-is way

The value of other people is that they have something unique to offer.

Zygmunt Bauman

offers unique people

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

political power needs

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

communication doors people

It is so true that in liquid modernity freedom was, so to speak, let off the leash, and for a quite a number of years the freedom of choice was "in principle" unlimited. One result was the weakening of inter-human bonds, particularly inherited bonds, and the counterfactual assumption that individuals must and can fend for themselves.

Zygmunt Bauman

choices numbers years

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

Zygmunt Bauman

asymmetry two

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

Zygmunt Bauman

rationality rulers weapons

'I am insecure' means: I can't cope on my own. The odds are overwhelming. I can't resist them on my own. I need us to join forces, stand shoulder to shoulder, march hand in hand.

Zygmunt Bauman

insecure odds mean

We belong to talking, not what talking is about... Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.

Zygmunt Bauman

exclusion silence talking

The planet is full and we will be rubbing shoulders forever. There is nowhere else to go.

Zygmunt Bauman

shoulders planets forever

When people think, rightly or wrongly, that marriage is forever, they are stimulated to seek and find a resolution, a modus vivendi, whenever they quarrel.

Zygmunt Bauman

forever people thinking

Once we realize that the strangers are here forever and won't go away, then, like husband and wife in the old-style marriage, we would try to find a way of living together peacefully and with mutual benefit. The sooner we understand that in a globalized world the diasporic nature of cohabitation is never likely to end, that it will always be with us, I believe such modus vivendi will be found.

Zygmunt Bauman

mutual-benefit husband believe

A whole world is taken to the grave with the dead person; each one of us is unique and unrepeatable.

Zygmunt Bauman

unique taken world