42 Quotes by Eric Hobsbawm

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

E tanto a Grã-Bretanha quando o mundo sabiam que a revolução lançada nestas ilhas não só pelos comerciantes e empresários como através deles, cuja única lei era comprar no mercado mais barato e vender sem restrição no mais caro estava transformando o mundo. Nada poderia detê-la. Os deuses e os reis do passado eram impotentes diante dos homens de negócios e das máquinas a vapor do presente.

On the whole, however, it was accepted that money not only talked, but governed. All the industrialist had to get to be accepted among the governors of society was enough money.

Our problem is not to trace the emergence of a world market, of a sufficiently active class of private entrepreneurs, or even (in England) of a state dedicated to the proposition that the maximization of private profit was the foundation of government policy...By the 1780s we can take the existence of all these for granted...

destruction of the past, or rather the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century. Most young men and women at the century's end grow up in apermanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times in which they live

La repugnancia a hacer la guerra no debe confundirse con la negativa a luchar

The periodic famines, the burden of labour which made men old at forty and women at thirty, were acts of God; they only became acts for which men were held responsible in times of abnormal hardship or revolution.

It is an irony of history that the first and greatest success of scientists in persuading governments of the indispensability of modern scientific theory to society was in the war against fascism. It is an even greater and more tragic irony that it was anti-fascist scientists who convinced the American government of the feasibility and necessity of manufacturing nuclear arms, which were then constructed by an international team of largely anti-fascist scientists.

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.