42 Quotes by Eric Hobsbawm

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

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

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

[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.

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

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.

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

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

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.