Eric Hobsbawm

All professionals, whether physicists, economists or musicians, live by and for peer judgment, even when they are being paid by people who…

— Eric Hobsbawm

Many years later, another Marxian rephrased this as the choice between socialism and barbarity. Which of these will prevail is a question…

— Eric Hobsbawm

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…

— Eric Hobsbawm

The only certain thing about the future is that it will surprise even those who have seen furthest into it.

— Eric Hobsbawm

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is…

— Eric Hobsbawm

As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.

— Eric Hobsbawm

The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.

— Eric Hobsbawm

He[Napoleon] had destroyed only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the dream of equality, liberty and fraternity, and of the people rising in…

— Eric Hobsbawm

It is one of the ironies of this strange century that the most lasting results of the October revolution, whose object was…

— Eric Hobsbawm

There is not much that even the most socially responsible scientists can do as individuals, or even as a group, about the…

— Eric Hobsbawm

Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production.

— Eric Hobsbawm

Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle.

— Eric Hobsbawm

“For, whatever was the case in de Tocqueville's day, not the passion for egalitarianism but an individualist, that is anti-authoritarian, antinomian though…

— Eric Hobsbawm

Telephone and telegraph were better means of communication than the holy man's telepathy

— Eric Hobsbawm

No serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently…

— Eric Hobsbawm

“Human mental identities are not like shoes, of which we can only wear one pair at a time. We are all multi-dimensional…

— Eric Hobsbawm

It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.

— Eric Hobsbawm

It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they're not like…

— Eric Hobsbawm

“The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the…

— Eric Hobsbawm

(Carmine Crocco) A farm-labourer and cowherd, had joined the Bourbon army, killed a comrade in a brawl, deserted and lived as an…

— Eric Hobsbawm

“In their way the brigands, dressed in torn peasant costume with Bourbon rosettes, or in more gorgeous apparel, were avengers and champions…

— Eric Hobsbawm

The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.

— Eric Hobsbawm

The most lasting and universal consequence of the French revolution is the metric system

— Eric Hobsbawm

Utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.

— Eric Hobsbawm

“The Labour party on the whole has not been a very effective opposition since the election, partly because it spent months and…

— Eric Hobsbawm