Ernest Gellner Quotes

11 quotes in 191 categories

• It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.
• I am deeply sensitive to the spell of nationalism. I can play about thirty Bohemian folk songs ... on my mouth-organ. My oldest friend, who…
• A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.
• Ideas, and even the detection of errors, require more than care and caution.
• The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.
• People are even more reluctant to admit that man explains nothing, than they were to admit that God explains nothing.
• Just as every girl should have a husband, preferably her own, so every culture must have its state, preferably its own.
• Nowledge which... transcends the bounds, the prejudices and prejudgements of any one society and culture is not an illusion but, on the contrary, a glorious…
• Civil Society is a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely, rather…
• America was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it.
• Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist...

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