The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.

The economic crisis, so conveniently operated and driven by the markets, by financial groups, by the needs of a globalized economy, faces the task of restoring social control, which the crisis of modernity lost sight of.

Rigidity of order is the artefact and sediment of the human agents ‘ freedom.

All certaintythat comes after the ‘original sin’ of dismantling the matter-of-factworld full of routine and short of reflection must be a manufacturedcertainty, a blatantly and unashamedly ‘made-up’ certainty,burdened with all the inborn vulnerability of human-made decisions.

The notion that we know all there is to know about people and their needs and that all these data are pinned down exactly and fully explained by the market, the state, sociological surveys, ratings, and everything else that turns people into the Global Anonymous.

Robbing humans of their faces and individuality is no less a form of evil than diminishing their dignity or looking for threats primarily among those who have immigrated or harbour different religious beliefs.

Globalization is the last failed hope that, somewhere, there still exists a land where one can escape and find happiness. Or the last failed hope that, somewhere, there still exists a land different from yours in terms of being able to oppose the sense of meaninglessness, the loss of criteria and, ultimately, moral blindness and the loss of sensitivity.

In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change – as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.

As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

We live in a globalising world. That means that all of us, consciously or not, depend on each other. Whatever we do or refrain from doing affects the lives of people who live in places we’ll never visit.

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.

In a consumer society, people wallow in things, fascinating, enjoyable things. If you define your value by the things you acquire and surround yourself with, being excluded is humiliating.

Madness is no madness when shared.

In our world of rampant individualisation, relationships are mixed blessings. They vacillate between a sweet dream and a nightmare, and there is no telling when one turns into the other.

The risk of the Holocaust is not that it will be forgotten, but that it will be embalmed and surrounded by monuments and used to absolve all future sins.

Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better.

You judge a society by the decency of living of the weakest.

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.

Relationships, like cars, should undergo regular services to make sure they are still roadworthy.

Happiness needs one-upmanship.

Man is in his short sojourn on earth equal to God in His eternity.

Civilisation, the orderly world in which we live, is frail. We are skating on thin ice. There is a fear of a collective disaster. Terrorism, genocide, flu, tsunamis.

This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You’re not lower class, you are excluded – outside.

En la historia del mundo, nunca antes los no-lugares han ocupado tanto espacio”. Los.

We already have – thanks to technology, development, skills, the efficiency of our work – enough resources to satisfy all human needs. But we don’t have enough resources, and we are unlikely ever to have, to satisfy human greed.

Like the phoenix, socialism is reborn from every pile of ashes left day in, day out, by burnt-out human dreams and charred hopes.

The carrying power of a bridge is not the average strength of the pillars, but the strength of the weakest pillar. I have always believed that you do not measure the health of a society by GNP but by the condition of its worst off.

Human attention tends to be focused on the satisfactions relationships are hoped to bring, precisely because somehow they have not been truly satisfactory. And if they do satisfy, the price of this satisfaction has often been found to be unacceptable.

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.

For intellectual authority, the appropriate version of Descartes ’s cogito would be today: I am talked about, therefore I am.

There is always a suspicion… that one is living a lie or a mistake; that something crucially important has been overlooked, missed, neglected, left untried, and unexplored; that a vital obligation to one’s own authentic self has not been met or that some chances of unknown happiness completely different from any happiness experienced before have to been taken up in time and are bound to be lost forever if they continue to be neglected.

In a world of global dependencies with no corresponding global polity and few tools of global justice, the rich of the world are free to pursue their own interests while paying no attention to the rest.

From the start and to this very day, modernity was about forcing nature to serve obediently human needs, ambitions and desires.

Utopia’ used to denote a coveted, dreamt-of distant goal to which progress should, could and would eventually bring the seekers after a world better serving human needs. In contemporary dreams, however, the image of ‘progress’ seems to have moved from the discourse of shared improvement to that of individual survival. Progress is no longer thought about in the context of an urge to rush ahead, but in connection with a desperate effort to stay in the race.

Postmodernity means the exhilarating freedom to pursue anything, yet mind-boggling uncertainty as to what is worth pursuing and in the name of what one should pursue it.

If political rights are necessary to set social rights in place, social rights are indispensable to make political rights ‘real’ and keep them in operation. The two rights need each other for their survival; that survival can only be their joint achievement.

Occupying the bottom end of the inequality ladder, and becoming a ‘collateral victim’ of a human action or a natural disaster, interact the way the opposite poles of magnets do: they tend to gravitate towards each other.

Politicians who call for the resuscitation of dying or terminally ill ‘family values’, and serious about what their calls imply, should begin by thinking hard about the consumerist roots of the simultaneous wilting of social solidarity inside workplaces and fading of the caring–sharing impulse inside family homes.

As Pierre Bourdieu signalled as long as two decades ago, coercion has by and large been replaced by stimulation, the once obligatory patterns of conduct by seduction, the policing of behaviour by PR and advertising, and normative regulation by the arousal of new needs and desires.

Consuming life cannot be other than a life of rapid learning, but it also needs to be a life of swift forgetting.