Zygmunt Bauman

Fulfilment is always in the future, and achievements lose their attraction and satisfying potential at the moment of their attainment, if not before.

the emphasis (together with, importantly, the burden of responsibility) has shifted decisively towards the self-assertion of the individual.

This fateful departure has been reflected in the relocation of ethical/political discourse from the frame of the ‘just society’ to that of ‘human rights’, that is refocusing that discourse on the right of individuals

Risks and contradictions go on being socially produced; it is just the duty and the necessity to cope with them which are being individualized.

The individual is the citizen’s worst enemy, de Tocqueville suggested. The ‘citizen’ is a person inclined to seek her or his own welfare through the well-being of the city – while the individual tends to be lukewarm, sceptical or wary about ‘common cause’, ‘common good’, ‘good society’ or ‘just society’.

The only two useful things one would expect, and wish, ‘public power’ to deliver are to observe ‘human rights’,

there are, simply, no effective ‘biographic solutions to systemic contradictions’,

Let me repeat: there is a wide and growing gap between the condition of individuals de jure and their chances to become individuals de facto

Thinking makes us human, but it is being human that makes us think.

The marriage between knowledge and power, a mere fantasy in the times of Plato, has turned into the routine