Eric Hobsbawm Quotes

18 quotes in 355 categories

• Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who…
• The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as…
• There is not much that even the most socially responsible scientists can do as individuals, or even as a group, about the social consequences of…
• Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production.
• It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they're not like the wrong Americans,…
• The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.
• It is one of the ironies of this strange century that the most lasting results of the October revolution, whose object was the global overthrow…
• Telephone and telegraph were better means of communication than the holy man's telepathy
• The most lasting and universal consequence of the French revolution is the metric system
• 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 peaceful…
• The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.
• The only certain thing about the future is that it will surprise even those who have seen furthest into it.
• As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.
• Utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.
• Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and…
• Many years later, another Marxian rephrased this as the choice between socialism and barbarity. Which of these will prevail is a question which the twenty-first…
• Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.
• It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.

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