Eric Hobsbawm famous quotes

03-28-2025

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.
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#Past #People #Contradiction
Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#Essentials #Raw Materials #Pakistan
Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left.
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#Believe #Past #People
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.
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#Groups #Outcast #American Patriotism
Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle .
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#Xenophobia #Looks #Becoming
The only certain thing about the future is that it will surprise even those who have seen furthest into it.
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#Surprise #Certain
(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.
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#Army #Past #Men
The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#Real #Team #People
N. S. Khrushchev established his supremacy in the U.S.S.R. after post-Stalinist alarums and excursions (1958-64). This admirable rough diamond, a believer in reform and peaceful coexistence, who incidentally emptied Stalin's concentration camps, dominated the international scene in the next few years. He was also perhaps the only peasant boy ever to rule a major state
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#Boys #Years #Peaceful
The most lasting and universal consequence of the French revolution is the metric system
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#Metrics #Revolution #Metric System
Telephone and telegraph were better means of communication than the holy man's telepathy
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#Communication #Mean #Men
It is one of the ironies of this strange century that the most lasting results of the October revolution, whose object was the global overthrow of capitalism, was to save its antagonist, both in war and in peace - that is to say, by providing it with the incentive, fear, to reform itself after the Second World War, and, by establishing the popularity of economic planning, furnishing it with some of the procedures for its reform
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#War #October #Revolution
The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#Conservative #Communism #Paradox
As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#Xenophobia #People #Chinese
Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production.
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#Capitalist #Humans
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.
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#Groups #Scientist #Individual
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.
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#Decision #Routine #Justified
It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#Book #Writing #Doe
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.
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#Years #Choices #Answers
Utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#Effort #Revolution #Social
[N]o serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.
-- Eric Hobsbawm

#Political #Too Much #Serious

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