Best 35 quotes of Eric Hobsbawm on MyQuotes

Eric Hobsbawm

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    Eric Hobsbawm

    All professionals, whether physicists, economists or musicians, live by and for peer judgment, even when they are being paid by people who cannot tell the difference.

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    Eric Hobsbawm

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

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    Eric Hobsbawm

    (Carmine Crocco) A farm-labourer and cowherd, had joined the Bourbon army, killed a comrade in a brawl, deserted and lived as an outlaw for ten years. He joined the liberal insurgents in 1860 in the hope of an amnesty for his past offences, and subsequently became the most formidable guerilla chief and leader of men on the Bourbon side.

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    Eric Hobsbawm

    He[Napoleon] had destroyed only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the dream of equality, liberty and fraternity, and of the people rising in its majesty to shake off oppression. It was a more powerful myth than his, for after his fall it was this, and not his memory, which inspired the revolutions of the nineteenth century, even in his own country.

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    Eric Hobsbawm

    Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.

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    Eric Hobsbawm

    Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left.

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    Eric Hobsbawm

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

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    Eric Hobsbawm

    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

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Eric Hobsbawm

    N. S. Khrushchev established his supremacy in the U.S.S.R. after post-Stalinist alarums and excursions (1958-64). This admirable rough diamond, a believer in reform and peaceful coexistence, who incidentally emptied Stalin's concentration camps, dominated the international scene in the next few years. He was also perhaps the only peasant boy ever to rule a major state

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    Eric Hobsbawm

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

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    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.

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    Eric Hobsbawm

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

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    Eric Hobsbawm

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

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    Eric Hobsbawm

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

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    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.

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    Eric Hobsbawm

    Utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.

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    Eric Hobsbawm

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

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    Eric Hobsbawm

    As a means of alleviating poverty, Christian charity was worse than useless, as could be seen in the Papal states, which abounded in it. But it was popular not only among the traditionalist rich, who cherished it as a safeguard against the evil of equal rights... but also among the traditionalist poor, who were profoundly convinced that they had a right to crumbs from the rich man's table.

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    Eric Hobsbawm

    But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people. Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain's GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can't, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can't, don't brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners.

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    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.

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    Eric Hobsbawm

    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.

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    Eric Hobsbawm

    It rests on the attempt since the 1970s to translate a pathological degeneration of the principle of laissez-faire into economic reality by the systematic retreat of states from any regulation or control of the activities of profit-making enterprise. This attempt to hand over human society to the (allegedly) self-controlling and wealth- or even welfare-maximising market, populated (allegedly) by actors in rational pursuit of their interests, had no precedent in any earlier phase of capitalist development in any developed economy, not even the USA. It was a reductio ad absurdum of what its ideologists read into Adam Smith, as the correspondingly extremist 100% state-planned command economy of the USSR was of what the Bolsheviks read into Marx.

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    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.

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    Eric Hobsbawm

    Most young men and women (...) grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in. This makes historians, whose business it is to remember what others forgot, more essential (...) than ever before.

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    Eric Hobsbawm

    Nevertheless, in some ways I had lost touch with many of the currents of French culture and theoretical discussion after the 1960s, and, although any admirer of Queneau and Perec cannot but be sympathetic to the French intellectual tradition of playing games with language, as French thinkers increasingly moved into the territory of ‘postmodernism’ I found them uninteresting, incomprehensible, and in any case of not much use to historians. Even their puns failed to grip.

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    Eric Hobsbawm

    On the other hand, the militant left, and many socialist intellectuals such as my old friend Ralph Miliband (whose sons were to become important figures in the offices of Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown), also wrote off the Labour Party until the moment when it had been captured and was ready to become ‘a real socialist party’, whatever that meant. I outraged some of my friends by pointing out that they were not seriously trying to defeat Mrs Thatcher. Whatever they thought, ‘they acted as though another Labour government like the ones we have had before from time to time since 1945 were not just unsatisfactory, but worse than no Labour government … (i.e.) worse than the only alternative government on offer, namely Mrs Thatcher’s

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    Eric Hobsbawm

    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.

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    Eric Hobsbawm

    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...

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    Eric Hobsbawm

    The Labour party on the whole has not been a very effective opposition since the election, partly because it spent months and months electing its new leader. I think the Labour party should, for one thing, stress much more that for most people in the past 13 years, the period was not one of collapse into chaos but actually one where the situation improved, and particularly in areas such as schools, hospitals and a variety of other cultural achievements—so the idea that somehow or other it all needs to be taken down and ground into the dust is not valid. I think we need to defend what most people think basically needs defending and that is the provision of some form of welfare from the cradle to the grave.

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    Eric Hobsbawm

    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.

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    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.