Just as every girl should have a husband, preferably her own, so every culture must have its state, preferably its own.

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness it invents nations where they do not exist.

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

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.

Capital, like capitalism, seems an overrated category.

The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.

Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment. That which one would insinuate, thereof one must speak.

The way forward does not lie in amateur and comically timeless linguistic sociology which takes 'forms of life ' for granted (and this is what philosophy has been recently), but in the systematic study of forms of life which does not take them for granted at all. It hardly matters whether such an inquiry is called philosophy or sociology.

In brief, nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which requires the ethnic boundaries should not be cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state a contingency already formally excluded by the principle in its general formulation should not separate the power holders from the rest.

It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.

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

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