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

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 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.

Who could be like him? Who could ever be like you? Each of us has his path. They run close together sometimes—for life, if we are fortunate—but they never cross.

I had a story-telling mother; she's written novels and short stories. So I feel like maybe I'm staying alive by telling tales.

Every event, or appearance, or accident, which seems to deviate from the ordinary course of nature has been rashly ascribed to the immediate action of the Deity.

To dare is to do ... to fear is to fail.

I love getting dressed up doing the whole premiere look.

I did one pageant in sixth grade, and I loved it! I loved the dresses and the big hair.

Whatever you think matters - doesn't. Follow this rule, and you will add decades to your life.

What if this cursed hand Were thicker than itself with brother's blood Is there not rain enough in the sweet heaves To wash it white as snow?

Mine honor is my life, both grow in one. Take honor from me, and my life is done. Then, dear my liege, mine honor let me try; In that I live, and for that I will die.

In Critical and baffling situations, it is always best to return to first principle and simple action