Eric Hobsbawm Quotes

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 historians are the people who produce it.

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

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.

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

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 regrettable operational necessity.

No serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.

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, who are not really Americans.

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

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

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 century must be left to answer.

All professionals, whether physicists, economists or musicians, live by and for peer judgment, even when they are being paid by people who cannot tell the difference.

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

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

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

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 their activities.

And yet, something has changed for the better. We have rediscovered that capitalism is not the answer, but the question.