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.

The only certain thing about the future is that it will surprise even those who have seen furthest into it.

No serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.

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

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

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.

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

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.

(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.

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

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

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.

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.