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.

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.

The sin they do by two and two they must pay for one by one.

Immortality is a long shot, I admit. But somebody has to be first.

Show me another pleasure like dinner which comes every day and lasts an hour.

In life we do many things, say many things, but the voice of suffering offered out of love - which is perhaps unheard by and unknown to others - is the loudest cry that can penetrate Heaven

Of the things they possessed in common, greatest of all was their almost uncanny pull at each others hearts.

Man is a living duty, a depository of powers that he must not leave in a brute state. Man is a wing.

I'm always using a towel around my head. Airports don't worry about me.

The school is a political prize of the highest importance. It cannot be deprived of its political character as long as it remains a public and compulsory institution.

True success is reaching our potential without compromising our values.

God, it's so painful when something that's so close is still so far out of reach.