Quotes by Eric Hobsbawm - Page 1

The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.
Eric Hobsbawm / Historian
Communism
Conservative
Paradox
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Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production.
Eric Hobsbawm / Historian
Capitalist
Human Beings
Humans
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Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle.
Eric Hobsbawm / Historian
Xenophobia
Becoming
Century
Looks
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The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.
Eric Hobsbawm / Historian
People
Real
Team
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The most lasting and universal consequence of the French revolution is the metric system
Eric Hobsbawm / Historian
Metric System
Metrics
Revolution
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Telephone and telegraph were better means of communication than the holy man's telepathy
Eric Hobsbawm / Historian
Communication
Men
Mean
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The only certain thing about the future is that it will surprise even those who have seen furthest into it.
Eric Hobsbawm / Historian
Certain
Surprise
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It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.
Eric Hobsbawm / Historian
Book
Printed Word
Writing
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Utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.
Eric Hobsbawm / Historian
Effort
Revolution
Social
Superhuman
Achieved
Device
Efforts
Generating
Major
Necessary
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Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.
Eric Hobsbawm / Historian
Essentials
Pakistan
Raw Materials
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As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.
Eric Hobsbawm / Historian
Xenophobia
Chinese
Expansion
Imports
Indian
People
Racism
Restaurants
Against
Cultural
Directed
Foreign
Global
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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.
Eric Hobsbawm / Historian
Political
Serious
Too Much
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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.
Eric Hobsbawm / Historian
Science
Groups
Scientist
Activities
Individuals
Scientists
Socially
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All professionals, whether physicists, economists or musicians, live by and for peer judgment, even when they are being paid by people who cannot tell the difference.
Eric Hobsbawm / Historian
Differences
Musician
People
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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.
Eric Hobsbawm / Historian
History
Past
People
Produce
Nation
Contradictions
Historians
Justifies
One Nation
Terms
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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 / Historian
Choices
Twenties
Years
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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.
Eric Hobsbawm / Historian
Decision
Justified
Routine
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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.
Eric Hobsbawm / Historian
Patriotism
Groups
Outcast
Measures
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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.
Eric Hobsbawm / Historian
Men
Army
Past
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He[Napoleon] had destroyed only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the dream of equality, liberty and fraternity, and of the people rising in its majesty to shake off oppression. It was a more powerful myth than his, for after his fall it was this, and not his memory, which inspired the revolutions of the nineteenth century, even in his own country.
Eric Hobsbawm / Historian
Dream
Country
Memories
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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 / Historian
Boys
Peaceful
Years
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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 / Historian
War
October Revolution
Reform
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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 / Historian
Believe
Past
People
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