Zygmunt Bauman Quotes

Want to be a well-paid bioethicist, with one, two, or even three university appointments? Just get yourself a two-piece navy polyester suit and follow these three simple rules: (1) Never name names. (2) Screw principles; just follow procedures. (3) Bury the money.

Great research universities must insist on independence from government and on the exercise of academic freedom.

Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.

Action and faith enslave thought, both of them in order not be troubled or inconvenienced by reflection, criticism, and doubt.

The real scientist is ready to bear privation and, if need be, starvation rather than let anyone dictate to him which direction his work must take.

Where suspicion fills the air and holds scholars in line for fear of their jobs, there can be no exercise of the free intellect. Supineness and dogmatism take the place of inquiry. A problem can no longer be pursued to its edges ... discussion often leaves off where it should begin.

When you're young it's boring to be a keeper.

In the long run [censorship] will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.

In short, whoever you may be, To this conclusion you'll agree, When every one is somebodee, Then no one's anybody!

It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power; we are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible, and which are not.

Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day.

I suspect that the peer-review system carries a good part of blame for the fact that something like sixty percent or more of journal articles are never quoted (which means leaving no trace on our joint scholarly pursuits), and (in my reception at any rate) the "learned journals" (with a few miraculous exceptions that entail, prominently, TCS) ooze monumental boredom.

Being like everybody is the same as being nobody.

An editor has to be selfless, and yet has also to be strong-minded.

An editor is bound to avoid the meshes of the law, which are always infinitely more costly to companies, or things, or institutions, than they are to individuals.

In the principle of equality I very clearly discern two tendencies; one leading the mind of every man to untried thoughts, the other prohibiting him from thinking at all.

I ask permission to be like everybody else,like the rest of the world and what's more, like anybody else:I beg you, with all my heart,if we are talking about me, since we are talking about me,please resist blasting the trumpet during my visitand resign yourselves to my quiet absence.

Man is not permitted without censure to follow his own thoughts in the search of truth, when they lead him ever so little out of the common road.

My policies are based not on some economics theory, but on things I and millions like me were brought up with: an honest day's work for an honest day's pay; live within your means; put by a nest egg for a rainy day; pay your bills on time; support the police.

Uncompromising thought is the luxury of the closeted recluse.

Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going a long time back. I said nothing. I am one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself.

Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?

The essence of a university is free and open inquiry, and when it loses that it is no longer a university.

The left are afraid of independent thinkers. They are afraid of people who are able to reason and think on their own.

If economic progress means that we become anonymous cogs in some great machine, then progress is an empty promise.