Eric Hobsbawm Quotes

Eric Hobsbawm presents blunt, critical commentary on capitalism and the paradoxes of communism.

14 quotes

  1. Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production.

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

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

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

  6. 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.

  7. As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.

  8. The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.

  9. 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.

  10. 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.

  11. Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle.

  12. No serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.

  13. It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.

  14. 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.