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I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.

— A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Her logic was a combination of half-truths and clichés, her worldview a compound of misconceptions deriving from a history of our nation as written from the perspective of a subway tunnel.

— A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Moreover, as every police unit dedicated to ‘serious crime’ will have found out, illegal acts committed at the ‘top’ are exceedingly difficult to disentangle from the dense network of daily ‘ordinary’ company dealings. When it comes to activity which openly pursues personal gain at the expense of others, the borderline between moves that are allowed and disallowed is necessarily poorly defined and always contentious – nothing to compare with the comforting unambiguity of the act of safe-breaking of forcing a lock.

— Globalization by Zygmunt Bauman

‘Flexibility’ only pretends to be a ‘universal principle’ of economic sanity, one that applies in equal measure to both the demand and the supply side of the labour market. The sameness of the term conceals its sharply different substance on each side of the divide. Flexibility of the demand side means freedom to move wherever greener pastures beckon, leaving the refuse and waste spattered around the last camp for the left-behind locals to clean up; above all, it means freedom to disregard all considerations except such as ‘make economic sense’. What looks, however, like flexibility on the demand side, rebounds on all those cast on the supply side as hard, cruel, impregnable and unassailable fate: jobs come and go, they vanish as soon as they appeared, they are cut in pieces and withdrawn without notice while the rules of the hiring/firing game change without warning – and there is little the job-holders and job-seekers may do to stop the see-saw. And so to meet the standards of flexibility set for them by those who make and unmake the rules –to be ‘flexible’ in the eyes of the investors – the plight of the ‘suppliers of labour’ must be as rigid and inflexible as possible – indeed, the very contrary of ‘flexible’: their freedom to choose, to accept or refuse, let alone to impose their own rules on the game, must be cut to the bare bone.

— Globalization by Zygmunt Bauman

The rich who were put on display as personal heroes for universal adoration and the patterns of universal emulation used once to be the ‘self-made men’, whose lives epitomized the benign effects of the work ethic and of reason strictly and doggedly adhered to. This is no longer the case. The object of adoration is now wealth itself – wealth as the warrant for a most fanciful and prodigal life-style. It is what one can do that matters, not what is to be done or what has been done. Universally adored in the persons of the rich is their wondrous ability to pick and choose the contents of their lives, places to live in now and then, partners to share those places with – and to change all of them at will and without effort; the fact that they seem never to reach points of no return, that there is no visible end to their reincarnations, that their future looks forever richer in content and more enticing than their past; and, last but not least, that the only thing which seems to matter to them is the range of prospects their wealth seems to throw open. These people seem, indeed, to be guided by the aesthetics of consumption; it is the display of extravagant, even frivolous aesthetic taste, not the obedience to work ethic or dry, abstemious precept of reason, the connoisseurship, not a mere financial success, that lie at the heart of their perceived greatness and founds their right to universal admiration.

— Globalization by Zygmunt Bauman

For the inhabitants of the first world – the increasingly cosmopolitan, extraterritorial world of global businessmen, global culture managers or global academics, state borders are levelled down, as they are dismantled for the world’s commodities, capital and finances. For the inhabitant of the second world, the walls built of immigration controls, of residence laws and of ‘clean streets’ and ‘zero tolerance’ policies, grow taller; the moats separating them from the sites of their desire and of dreamed-of redemption grow deeper, while all bridges, at the first attempt to cross them, prove to be drawbridges. The first travel at will, get much fun from their travel (particularly if travelling first class or using private aircraft), are cajoled or bribed to travel and welcomed with smiles and open arms when they do. The second travel surreptitiously, often illegally, sometimes paying more for the crowded steerage of a stinking unseaworthy boat than others pay for business-class gilded luxuries – and are frowned upon, and, if unlucky, arrested and promptly deported, when they arrive.

— Globalization by Zygmunt Bauman

The wish of the hungry to go where food is plentiful is what one would naturally expect from rational human beings; letting them act on their wishes is also what conscience would suggest is the right, moral thing to do. It is because of its undeniable rationality and ethical correctness that the rational and ethically conscious world feels so crestfallen in the face of the prospect of the mass migration of the poor and hungry; it is so difficult, without feeling guilty, to deny the poor and hungry their right to go where food is more plentiful; and it is virtually impossible to advance convincing rational arguments proving that their migration would be, for them, an unreasonable decision to take. The challenge is truly awesome: one needs to deny the others the self-same right to freedom of movement which one eulogizes as the topmost achievement of the globalizing world and the warrant of its growing prosperity …

— Globalization by Zygmunt Bauman

The city, built originally for the sake of security – to protect residents inside the city walls against malevolent invaders always coming from outside – in our times ‘has become associated more with danger than with safety’ – so says Nan Elin. In our postmodern times ‘the fear factor has certainly grown, as indicated by the growth in locked car and house doors and security systems, the popularity of “gated” and “secure” communities for all age and income groups, and the increasing surveillance of public spaces, not to mention the unending reports of danger emitted by the mass media.’ Contemporary fears, the typically ‘urban fears’, unlike those fears which led once to the construction of cities, focus on the ‘enemy inside’. This kind of fear prompts less concern with the integrity and fortitude of the city as a whole – as a collective property and a collective warrant of individual safety – as it does with the isolation and fortification of one’s own homestead inside the city. The walls built once around the city now crisscross the city itself, and in a multitude of directions. Watched neighbourhoods, closely surveilled public spaces with selective admission, heavily armed guards at the gate and electronically operated doors – are all now aimed against the unwanted co-citizens, rather than foreign armies or highway robbers, marauders and other largely unknown dangers lying in ambush on the other side of the city gates.

— Globalization by Zygmunt Bauman