The only certain thing about the future is that it will surprise even those who have seen furthest into it.

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.

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.

It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us

There was something comforting about believing in things that didn’t exist.

The first step for a leader is to be right with yourself. Integrity is the basis of leadership.

In family relationships love is really spelled t-i-m-e, time.

America is becoming a drug infested nation. Drugs are becoming cheaper than candy bars. We are not going to let it happen any longer.

I apologize for my terrible interview skills.

My understanding of God has come from my own personal experiences. Because I was in trouble so many times in New York that if you were me, you would believe in God too.

I got to wear pancake makeup because you know I'm a show biz professional and they all wear pancake makeup. I got to drink free cokes!

I'm not good enough, technically, to be a classic musician. I lack discipline.

You ain't gotta be a dope boy to have money.