Ernest Gellner Quotes

Tribalism never prospers, for when it does, everyone will respect it as a true nationalism, and no-one will dare call it tribalism.

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist.

It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.

The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.

Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment. That which one would insinuate, thereof one must speak.

A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.

Just as every girl should have a husband, preferably her own, so every culture must have its state, preferably its own.

People are even more reluctant to admit that man explains nothing, than they were to admit that God explains nothing.

Ideas, and even the detection of errors, require more than care and caution.

America was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it.

I am a humble adherent of...Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalism.

Capital, like capitalism, seems an overrated category.

Obstruction of mobility, where it occurs, is one of the most serious and intractable problems of industrial society.

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.