Skip to content

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

Another quote →

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.

All Zygmunt Bauman quotes →

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.