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Memory is life. It is always carried by groups of living people, and therefore it is in permanent evolution. -- Eric Hobsbawm
So far as I am aware no leader of a party of the European left in the past twenty-five years has declared capitalism as such to be unacceptable as a system. The only public figure to do so unhesitatingly was Pope John Paul II. -- Eric Hobsbawm
For, whatever was the case in de Tocqueville's day, not the passion for egalitarianism but an individualist, that is anti-authoritarian, antinomian though curiously legalistic anarchism, has become the core of the value system in the USA. -- Eric Hobsbawm
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
More history than ever is today being revised or invented by people who do not want the real past, but only a past that suits their purpose. Today is the great age of historical mythology. The defence of history by its professionals is today more urgent in politics than ever. We are needed. -- Eric Hobsbawm
Like Machiavelli himself, he [Edward Luttwak] enjoys truth not only because it is true but also because it shocks the naive -- Eric Hobsbawm
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
Utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved. -- Eric Hobsbawm
As one would expect of tourists, they tried to find poverty colourful, -- Eric Hobsbawm
The only result of a horse race which historians can tell us with absolute confidence is one that has already been run. -- Eric Hobsbawm
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
The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people. -- Eric Hobsbawm
Still, let us not disarm, even in unsatisfactory times. Social injustice still needs to be denounced and fought. The world will not get better on its own. -- Eric Hobsbawm
Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market. -- Eric Hobsbawm
[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
If physical mobility is an essential condition of freedom, the bicycle has probably been the greatest single device for achieving what Marx called the full realization of the possibilities of being human invented since Gutenberg, and the only one without obvious drawbacks. -- Eric Hobsbawm
The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative. -- Eric Hobsbawm
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
The only certain thing about the future is that it will surprise even those who have seen furthest into it. -- Eric Hobsbawm
As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports. -- Eric Hobsbawm
Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle . -- Eric Hobsbawm
Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production. -- Eric Hobsbawm
The most lasting and universal consequence of the French revolution is the metric system -- Eric Hobsbawm
Telephone and telegraph were better means of communication than the holy man's telepathy -- Eric Hobsbawm
Indeed, it may be suggested that 'traditions' and pragmatic conventions or routines are inversely related. -- Eric Hobsbawm
There is a patent conflict between the need to reverse or at least to control the impact of our economy on the biosphere and the imperatives of a capitalist market: maximum continuing growth in the search for profit. -- Eric Hobsbawm
It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does. -- Eric Hobsbawm
Seventy years after Marx's death, one third of the human race lived under regimes ruled by communist parties which claimed to represent his ideas and realise his aspirations. -- Eric Hobsbawm
The Communist Manifesto as political rhetoric has an almost biblical force. -- Eric Hobsbawm
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
And yet, something has changed for the better. We have rediscovered that capitalism is not the answer, but the question. -- Eric Hobsbawm