Eric Hobsbawm Quotes
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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.
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People may not like to meet bandits, especially on a dark night, but a taste for reading about them seems to be universal.
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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.
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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.
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In the simplest terms the question who or what caused the Second World War can be answered in two words: Adolf Hitler.
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Utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.
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As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.
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(Carmine Crocco) A farm-labourer and cowherd, had joined the Bourbon army, killed a comrade in a brawl, deserted and lived as an outlaw for ten years. He joined the liberal insurgents in 1860 in the hope of an amnesty for his past offences, and subsequently became the most formidable guerilla chief and leader of men on the Bourbon side.
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Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production.
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No serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.
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Liberalism was failing. If I'd been German and not a Jew, I could see I might have become a Nazi, a German nationalist. I could see how they'd become passionate about saving the nation. It was a time when you didn't believe there was a future unless the world was fundamentally transformed.
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Why brilliant fashion-designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed,sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors, is one of the most obscure questions in history; and, for the historian of culture, one of the most central.
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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.
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The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of ealier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century.
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The world that went to pieces at the end of the 1980's was the world shaped by the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917.
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Though the web of history cannot be unraveled into separate threads without destroying it, a certain amount of subdivion of the subject is, for practical purposes, essential.
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Surrealism was a genuine addition to the repertoire of avant-garde arts, its novelty attested by the ability to produce shock, incomprehension, or what amounted to the same thing, a sometimes, embarrassed laughter, even among the older avant-garde.
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The best approach to this cultural revolution is therefore through family and household, i.e. through the structure of relations between the secondhand generations. In most societies this had been impressively resistant to sudden change, though this does not mean that such structures were static.
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Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle.
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The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.