19 Quotes by Ernest Gellner

America was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it.

Obstruction of mobility, where it occurs, is one of the most serious and intractable problems of industrial society.

Civil Society is a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely, rather than imposed by birth or sustained by awesome ritual. You can join the Labour Party without slaughtering a sheep...

Ideas, and even the detection of errors, require more than care and caution.

It is precisely by binding things together that traditional visions perpetuate themselves and the prejudgments contained within them; and it is by insisting on prising things apart that we have liberated ourselves from them.

A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.

People are even more reluctant to admit that man explains nothing, than they were to admit that God explains nothing.

But the whole idea of knowledge, even, or especially, of oneself and one’s own inner states, attained by direct contact and not dependent on theoretical and conceptual assumptions, is absurd.

Capital, like capitalism, seems an overrated category.