Quotes by Eric Hobsbawm

• As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.