All Quotes

“Gods always behave like the people who make them. Tell My Horse (1938), Ch. 15, p. 219”

“Crazy for This Democracy”

“I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.”

“I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul , nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal. Even in the helter”

“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry . It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It is beyond me. But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first”

“Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. Ch. 1, p. 9”

“Well, Ah see Mouth”

“Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches. Ch. 2, p. 8”

“After a while she got up from where she was and went over the little garden field entire. She was seeking confirmation of the voice and vision, and everywhere she found and acknowledged answers. A personal answer for all other creations except herself. She felt an answer seeking her, but where? When? How? Ch. 2”

“Passion and pessimism”

“[Following the second world war] If you looked at the political spectrum in Poland at that time, the Communist party promised the best solution. Its political programme was the most fitting for the issues which Poland faced. And I was completely dedicated. Communist ideas were just a continuation of the Enlightenment.”

“[After an article by Bogdan Musiał was published in Poland alleging Bauman had worked for the Polish secret service] The fact that I for three years cooperated with intelligence”

“What did that involve, exactly?”

“Professor with a past”

“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. Quoted in "Ziggy Stardust" , New Humanist”

“Once governments exclude people you can stop them from being protected. Societies begin to manipulate fears about groups. When the welfare state is in crisis we have to be concerned about such a feature of [society]”

“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.”

“The sociologist influencing Labour's new generation”

“in the course of, and through comparison”