Eric Hobsbawm Short Quotes

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

Eric Hobsbawm
This was the kind of war which existed in order to produce victory parades.
Of the Falklands War

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

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

Eric Hobsbawm
Telephone and telegraph were better means of communication than the holy man's telepathy

Eric Hobsbawm
The most lasting and universal consequence of the French revolution is the metric system

Eric Hobsbawm
All of us thought that the crisis of the 1930s was the final crisis of capitalism. it was not.

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
For 80 per cent of humanity the Middle Ages ended suddenly in the 1950s; or perhaps better still, they were felt to end in the 1960s.

Eric Hobsbawm
First, utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.

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

Eric Hobsbawm
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
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
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
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
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
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