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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote