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[On the Polish government in the 1950s] My analysis was that the only wish of Communism was the need to stay in power.

— Zygmunt Bauman

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More quotes by Zygmunt Bauman

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Ill can he rule the great, that cannot reach the small.

Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene (1589)

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.

James Madison

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

Leon Trotsky The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

John Adams

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Zygmunt Bauman (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.