“If their way was a blind alley, let us not deny them the longing for liberty and justice which moved them.” — Eric Hobsbawm Copy Share Image
All professionals, whether physicists, economists or musicians, live by and for peer judgment, even when they are being paid by people who cannot tell… — Eric Hobsbawm Copy Share
Many years later, another Marxian rephrased this as the choice between socialism and barbarity. Which of these will prevail is a question which the… — Eric Hobsbawm Copy Share
N. S. Khrushchev established his supremacy in the U.S.S.R. after post-Stalinist alarums and excursions (1958-64). This admirable rough diamond, a believer in reform and… — Eric Hobsbawm Copy Share
The only certain thing about the future is that it will surprise even those who have seen furthest into it. — Eric Hobsbawm Copy Share
Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past,… — Eric Hobsbawm Copy Share
As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports. — Eric Hobsbawm Copy Share
The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people. — Eric Hobsbawm Copy Share
He[Napoleon] had destroyed only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the dream of equality, liberty and fraternity, and of the people rising in its majesty… — Eric Hobsbawm Copy Share
It is one of the ironies of this strange century that the most lasting results of the October revolution, whose object was the global… — Eric Hobsbawm Copy Share
There is not much that even the most socially responsible scientists can do as individuals, or even as a group, about the social consequences… — Eric Hobsbawm Copy Share
Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production. — Eric Hobsbawm Copy Share
Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle. — Eric Hobsbawm Copy Share
“For, whatever was the case in de Tocqueville's day, not the passion for egalitarianism but an individualist, that is anti-authoritarian, antinomian though curiously legalistic… — Eric Hobsbawm Copy Share
Telephone and telegraph were better means of communication than the holy man's telepathy — Eric Hobsbawm Copy Share
No serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so. — Eric Hobsbawm Copy Share
