Bauman, Z. (2007)

Bauman, Z. (2007). ''Liquid Times. Living in an age of uncertainty.'' Polity.


 * (6) “No well-being of one place is innocent of the misery of another.”
 * (14) “With the state-built and state-serviced defenses against existential tremors progressively dismantled, and the arrangements for collective self-defense, such as trade unions and other instruments for collective bargaining, increasingly disempowered by the pressure of market competition that erode the solidarity of the weak – it is now left to individuals to seek, find and practice individual solutions to socially produced troubles, and to try all that through individual, solitary actions, while being equipped with tools and resources that are blatantly inadequate to the task.”
 * (16) Adam Curtis: “In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all politicians have left to maintain their power.”
 * (65) "Without political rights, people cannot be confident of their personal rights; but without social rights, political rights will remain an unattainable dream, a useless fiction or a cruel joke for the large number of those to whom they have been granted by the letter of the law."
 * (66) "Without collectively endorsed insurance, the poor and indolent (and more generally the weak balancing at the verge of exclusion) have no stimulus for political engagement - and certainly not for participation in a democratic game of elections."
 * (74) Manuel Castells: "The space of the upper tier is usually connected to global communication and to a vast network of exchange, open to messages and experiences that embrace the entire world. At the other end of the spectrum, segmented local networks, often ethnically based, rely on their identity as the most valuable resource to defend their interests, and ultimately their being."
 * (82) "For most of us and for most of the time, local issues seen to be the only ones we can 'do something about' - influence, repair, improve, redirect."
 * (83) "... cities have become dumping grounds for globally conceived and gestated problems."
 * (87) "The drive towards a 'community of similarity' is a sign of withdrawal not just from the otherness outside, but also from commitment to the lively yet turbulent, invigorating yet cumbersome interaction inside."
 * (100) "The sole task hunters pursue is another 'kill', big enough to fill their game-bags to capacity."
 * (100) "We are all hunters now, or told to be hunters and compelled to act as hunters do, om penalty of eviction from hunting, if not (perish the thought!) of relegation to the ranks of the game."
 * (108) "If life of continuing and continuous hunting is another utopia, it is contrary to the utopias of the past - a utopia without an end. A bizarre utopia indeed, measured by orthodox standards; the original utopias derived their magnetic powers from their promise of an end to toil; the hunters' utopia is a dream of toil never ending. A strange, unorthodox utopia - but a utopia all the same, promising the same unattainable prize brandished by all utopias, namely an ultimate and radical solution to human problems past, present and future, and an ultimate and radical cure for the sorrows and pains of the human condition."
 * (109) "Having reshaped the course of life into an unending series of self-focused pursuits, each episode lived through as an overture to the next, offers no occasion for reflection about the direction and the sense of it all. When (if) such an occasion finally comes, at the moment of falling out of the hunting life, or being banned from it, it is usually to late for that reflection to bear on the way life - one's own as much as that of others - is shaped, and so too late to oppose its present shape and effectively dispute its propriety."