I Am Not A Prophet;

Relationships, Like Cars, Should Undergo Regular Services To Make Sure They Are Still Roadworthy.

In "solid Modernity" Difference Was Tolerated As A Temporary Irritant Only, Expected To Disappear Tomorrow, When "those Aliens" Will Become Like Us. "living With Strangers" Was Therefore Not Something To Last And Did Not Call For Developing Appropriate Arts And Skills. Now, However, It Looks Like That Diasporic Context Of Our Living Will Not Go Away - It Will Be There Forever, So Learning How To Live With Strangers Day In, Day Out Without Abandoning My Own Strangeness Is High On The Agenda.

There Were No "unemployed" In The Impoverished Polish Countryside Before The Second World War. Not A Single Unemployed. Every Child That Was Born In The Peasant Family Had His Room At The Table And His Job In The Field, Stable Or Pigsty... If There Was Not Enough Food, Everybody Got Less. If Food Was Plentiful, Everybody Ate Better. In Such A Setting, We May Say, The Problem Of Security Couldn't Even Arise... One Was Born With Life-long Rights; The Only Thing That One Could Not Do Was To Change Them. A Setting Good On The Side Of Security, Though Bad On The Side Of Freedom.

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.

We Have Found Ourselves In The Period Of "interregnum": The Old Works No More, The New Is Not Yet Born. But The Awareness That Without It Being Born We Are All Marked For Demise, Is Already Much Alive, As Is The Awareness That The Hard Nut We Must Urgently Crack Is Not The Presence Of "too Many Poor", But "too Many Rich".