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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

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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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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.