The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be jus….

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 thei….

He[Napoleon] had destroyed only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the dream of equality, liberty and fraternity, and of the people rising in its maj….

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

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 bel….

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

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

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

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

No serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently ….

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 ca….

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

Many years later, another Marxian rephrased this as the choice between socialism and barbarity. Which of these will prevail is a question which the t….

It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they're not like the ….

Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production..

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

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

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 histor….

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

(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….

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